It’s been a long time now since peak oil dropped off the radar screens of public consciousness. Mention it these days and the reaction you’ll get from the few people who remember it at all amounts to “Yeah, that’s right, weren’t people scared back in the day that we were going to run out of oil? Just one more doomsday cult that turned out to be dead wrong. Hey, did you hear about [insert random media babble here]?”
What’s more, in a certain sense, that reaction is justified. There was indeed a doomsday cult around peak oil, and it did in fact turn out to be dead wrong. That’s undeniable. What gets missed in this kind of conversation is that the the people who promoted and believed in the doomsday cult didn’t understand peak oil. They got even the most basic facts about it wrong, and wrenched the entire subject wholly out of shape to fit a preconceived narrative. That’s why you had so many people insisting at the top of their lungs that someday soon the world’s oilfields would echo to that disappointing slurping sound that tells you you’ve gotten to the bottom of the milkshake and there’s no more left, and that industrial civilization would plunge into the world’s biggest remake of Mad Max shortly thereafter.
I freely admit that I believed the same thing, back when I was fifteen and first understood that petroleum supplies are finite. Fifteen-year-olds believe a lot of silly things. Since I’m autistic, my predictable response was to hit the books and learn something about the subject, and this cured me of the mistaken belief just named. That was why, when I posted my very first online essay about peak oil in 2005, I titled it “The Long Road Down” and explained, in quite some detail, why a sudden apocalyptic end to industrial society was very nearly the last thing anyone needs to worry about. I discussed the same thing at even more length over the following decade or so of blog posts, and I also refined my analysis considerably during that time, focusing especially on the crucial role of economic factors.
The reactions I got were among the most interesting features of that whole period. Granted, there were some people who read my essays on the subject, thought about the subject, and either decided that my arguments made sense or challenged them on carefully reasoned grounds. Far more often, though, people simply gave me a blank look and then trotted out one of two canned arguments. It was always one or the other. Either they insisted that progress would surely take care of the issue and keep us on track for a future among the stars, or they insisted that a sudden apocalyptic catastrophe was surely on its way and nothing could be done about it.
What made this all the more fascinating is that I’d already discussed this weird dichotomy in “The Long Road Down”. As I wrote then, “Most people would notice something odd if two meteorologists, discussing tomorrow’s weather on a wet autumn day, ignored all possibilities except clear weather or a sudden snowstorm. Yet the same sort of illogic goes unchallenged in debates about our future.” That dichotomy didn’t go unchallenged during the era of the peak oil movement, but in most cases the challenges bounced right off the rock-solid mental armor of the true believers in progress and apocalypse. It wasn’t even that the true believers in question argued against the idea of a long ragged decline—the fate, please note, of every other human civilization in history that outran its resource base. It really did look as though they simply couldn’t process the thought.
There were times when that failure to think got positively surreal. Talking about the economic side of peak oil in particular got weird reactions. Any time I posted something about the hard economic realities faced by industrial society—whether I was exploring the dismal economics of nuclear power, the even more dismal economics of space travel, the future of the internet once it stopped getting vast direct and indirect subsidies, or what have you—I could count on a sudden rush of comments, mostly by people who didn’t usually post to my blog, babbling at the top of their virtual lungs about everything but the economic issues I’d raised. If I confronted them directly, I got the online equivalent of the thousand-mile stare of the true believer. It took a while for me to realize that in our society, as in all others, there are taboos that most people obey blindly and thoughts that most people won’t let themselves think.
Just now, one of the things hobbled most severely by these taboos is clear thinking about the future. Part of the problem is that faith in progress has long been the de facto established religion of our society. Like all established religions, the religion of progress has narratives that assign specific roles to believers and unbelievers, and it’s remarkable how often unbelievers in their culture’s established religion get suckered into playing their assigned role even when that guarantees that they will suffer failure and humiliation.
The doomsday believers are a fine example. In the mythology of the religion of progress, people who disapprove of whatever set of changes get labeled “progress” are supposed to picture the past as a golden age, bemoan the coming of change, and predict impending apocalyptic disaster if the next round of changes go through. That is to say, their job is to be wrong, so the proponents of progress can mock them for their folly. That’s the narrative into which too many people in the peak oil scene got trapped twenty years ago. What’s more, when peak oil didn’t give them the apocalypse they so eagerly predicted, a great many of them switched over into some other version of the apocalypse myth—especially but not only the climate change version—and made fools of themselves all over again.
The tangled emotional roots of apocalyptic belief, the fears and desires that lead people to insist against all the evidence of history that this time is different and the end of the world will surely come on schedule, deserve much more attention than they’ve received. That’s not the task I mean to take up here, however. It so happens that alongside the crowds yelling about the impending peak oil apocalypse, and their equal and opposite numbers who yelled just as loudly about the mighty technologies that were sure to brush aside peak oil and take us to the stars, there were some of us who took peak oil seriously on its own terms. We made predictions on that basis, and by and large those predictions have turned out to be accurate.
Thus I think it’s time to take another look at peak oil, drawing on the extensive body of theory and evidence clustered around that concept to gauge the next steps in the long road down. I’m well aware that this may be a futile effort—the rise of an increasingly shrill politics of hatred and rage on all sides of our fractured political landscape has made clear thinking even more difficult than it was in 2005—but those who are still able to resist the seductions of today’s bipartisan nastiness might gain a useful insight or two from the effort. With that in mind, let’s begin.
Some definitions are in order. The phrase “peak oil” is shorthand for the worldwide peak of conventional petroleum production, which happened in 2005. The decline in conventional oil production since then has been largely masked by increases in unconventional production—that is to say, tar sand extractives, natural gas liquids, oil shale liquids produced by hydrofracturing (“fracking”), biofuels, and the like. The rise of unconventional production is the reason we didn’t get the Mad Max future so many clueless people were predicting twenty years ago. At the same time, the difference between conventional and unconventional production matters; we’ll get to the reasons why when this discussion is a little further along.
Petroleum, conventional and unconventional, still accounts for the largest share of world energy production and provides nearly all the energy used in transportation. Two other fossil fuels, coal and natural gas, account for the great majority of the remainder. Hydropower provides a small share of electricity. Nuclear fission, solar power, windpower? All together, they currently amount to less than 15% of world primary energy production, because they’re niche resources propped up by government subsidies for political reasons. They have to be propped up that way because they don’t pay for themselves. They may be technically feasible, in other words, but they’re hopeless in economic terms.
Then there’s the wonderful world of imaginary energy technologies, which play a huge role in the imagination of our time but have never produced a single kilowatt-hour and never will. Nuclear fusion is the poster child here. Billions upon billions of dollars have been poured down that rathole over the last three quarters of a century, one earnest press release follows another, but fusion continues to hover like a ghost in the haunted house of our imaginary Tomorrowlands. There are serious reasons to doubt that commercial fusion power is possible at all, but even if the scientists finally manage the trick, it won’t help. The reasons, again, are economic. Best current estimates are that if a commercial fusion plant can be built at all, it’ll cost many times as much as a fission plant of comparable output—and fission plants can’t survive without huge subsidies.
There are plenty of other imaginary energy technologies out there. Right now a flurry of new fission reactor designs occupy a prominent place. Inevitably, they’re all being promoted as cheap, clean, and safe. If we’ve learned anything over the last century, though, it’s that every fission technology is cheap, clean, and safe just as long as it stays on the drawing board; the soaring costs and dangers only become evident once they’re built. Nonetheless a great deal of money is being poured down those ratholes right now, too, and a great deal more will doubtless go the same way over the years to come.
Bring up points like these, and extend them to other subsidy dumpsters such as photovoltaic farms and wind turbines, and the reaction is predictable: “But there has to be something!” That’s where you see the power of the mythic narrative of progress, the faith-based credo at the heart of our culture’s pseudosecular belief system. Rationally speaking, no, there doesn’t have to be another energy source to replace the ones we’ve splashed around so improvidently. To insist that the universe has to give us as much cheap energy as we happen to want, just because we want it, is to surrender to the mental habits of a spoiled two-year-old.
Of course it’s impossible to prove in advance that some deus ex machina won’t hand us the new energy source of our dreams. It’s just as impossible to prove in advance there isn’t some lurid catastrophe waiting in the wings to squash us like so many cockroaches. Equally, as I pointed out in 2005, it’s impossible to prove in advance that aliens from space won’t go zipping through our atmosphere in flying teacups next Tuesday, dropping radioactive vegetables on everyone named Fred. That doesn’t turn any of these claims into a reasonable basis for planning for the future. Set aside such fond fantasies, and what remains?
That’s where the message peak oil has to communicate becomes far more edgy than any of the alternatives, because what remains is simply that we get to continue down the path we’ve been on for the last fifty years. Things will keep going the way they’ve been going, down a path of slow unraveling, infrastructure decay, and a rising tide of political, economic, and social dysfunction. The reasons for this, once again, are economic.
This is where the difference between conventional and unconventional oil resources comes into play. The reason that conventional resources got that designation is that they’re relatively easy and thus relatively cheap to extract, refine, and use. Nobody bothered with tar sands, natural gas liquids, shale oil, or the like when conventional oil was abundant, because it was so much cheaper simply to drill a shallow well in Pennsylvania or Texas and let the good times roll. Unconventional resources became important only when the supply of conventional oil peaked and began to decline. That meant, in turn, increased costs.
Those costs are not abstract. They measure the soaring inputs of labor, energy, and raw materials that have to go into the process of extracting and refining unconventional oil. That’s the most important factor that’s driven up the cost of oil from less than $10 a barrel in 2000 to seven to ten times that figure today: in terms of real inputs, oil simply costs that much more to produce. This means that more and more labor, energy, and raw materials have to be diverted from other uses in the global economy to keep the same amount of oil flowing. This is also a core reason why the price of everything else has risen, too, because nearly every good and service in the modern industrial world depends on petroleum for its manufacture, transport, maintenance, and disposal.
The other fossil fuels have similar factors affecting them. As readily available deposits of natural gas and coal are exhausted, finding and extracting new deposits costs more, because the cheapest deposits are inevitably found and extracted first. Coal also suffers from major issues with quality: the high-quality anthracite coal that powered the Victorian era is nearly gone, the middle grade bituminous coal that replaced it is going, and most of what’s left is lignite, which gives much less energy when burnt—so much so that there are plenty of lignite deposits that aren’t worth mining, because you get less energy from them than it takes to get them out of the ground.
The result has been compared to the Red Queen’s race in Alice Through The Looking Glass, in which Alice has to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. That’s the predicament we’re in. More and more of the world’s total economic output has to be put back into the process of extracting our most important energy resources to keep the supply close to current levels. This imposes increasing drag on all other economic activities. If you’re wondering why the products for sale in stores just keep on getting shoddier and more expensive, why the infrastructure where you live gets more and more ragged each year, and why lifestyles that most people could afford a few decades ago have been priced out of reach for a larger and larger share of the population as time goes on, the rising toll of energy costs is a central reason why.
Nor do alternative energy resources offer a way out, for a simple but crucial reason: all of them, without exception, are built, transported, installed, maintained, dismantled, and disposed of using fossil fuels. You can’t build a wind turbine using nothing but energy from wind turbines. Some calculations, in fact, indicate that the amount of oil, coal, and natural gas needed by a wind turbine from the beginning to the end of its life cycle embody more energy than the wind turbine itself will produce during its working life. In a very real sense, then a wind turbine is simply a roundabout way of burning fossil fuels. This explains why wind turbines can’t pay for themselves without huge government subsidies—and it also explains why CO2 levels in the atmosphere have kept climbing steadily, even as wind turbines sprouted like weeds across the industrial world.
This is the real meaning of peak oil: a long era of downward pressure on lifestyles and economic activity around the world, with no prospect of an end in sight. There will still be liquid fuels to burn a century from now, but by then the engines that burn them and the lifestyles that depend on them will be prohibitively expensive for all but the rich. Economies will downscale and localize for the simple reason that transport costs will put any other option out of reach—the much-ballyhooed global economy of the recent past is already coming apart for this reason among others—and political power will also relocalize as the capacity to enforce government edicts over continental areas becomes increasingly fragile.
A word or two probably needs to be said about the role of high technology in all this. Right now vast amounts of money are being poured into the quest for artificial general intelligence (AGI)—a machine that can outthink humans. Read the output of the Silicon Valley moguls pushing this and it becomes instantly clear that this is a desperate Hail Mary maneuver, an attempt to find some way out from between the jaws of our predicament. The moguls in question have at their beck and call all the human intelligence they can hire, and that isn’t enough to find a way out of the trap we’ve made for ourselves. Trying to come up with something that can discover things humans can’t is the only option they can think of.
From one perspective, this is a textbook example of hubris, that quality best described as the overweening pride of the doomed. From another, it’s a measure of just how desperate the best informed members of our society think our situation really is. It was doubtless inevitable that such an attempt would be made; even within the AI industry, a growing number of voices are pointing out why it’s doomed to fail, but we can let those pass for now. The point that matters here is that technology does not create energy; it can show us how to use existing energy sources in new ways, but the hard limits of economics have to be faced; so do the even harder laws of thermodynamics—and it’s not a good sign that many supposedly educated people these days are embracing a fond faith that those latter laws can be bent or broken if we just wish hard enough.
In the real world, the one where we’re all going to spend the rest of our lives, chasing so dubious a set of fantasies has very little to offer. Instead, it’s time to take a good hard look at the future ahead. It so happens that twenty years ago, in the early months of my former blog The Archdruid Report, I sketched out the shape of the world that was bearing down on us. Over the months to come, I plan on revisiting those predictions, noting the things I got wrong as well as the considerably larger number of things I got right. Once that necessary review has been accomplished, and a slightly later set of longer-range predictions assessed, we can go on to get a better sense of what lies ahead as we continue following the long road down.
*****
July has five Wednesdays in it, and as longtime readers know, this means you get to nominate, and vote on, the topic for the fifth Wednesday post. What do you want to read about? Inquiring archdruids want to know.
I am curious if you have heard of the news a few years ago of when Russia discovered an estimated 511 billion barrels of oil under Antarctica!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Massive-Oil-Find-in-Antarctica-Raises-Concerns.amp.html
Can you see a rush for Antarctica over the next century or beyond (particularly as it continues to thaw)?
Hi JMG, another fine post, and I’m looking forward to review of predictions. We now know from experience that predictions are tough to make, especially about the future – as Mr. Berra said long ago.
I fell sideways into the binary thinking trap around peak oil – not only believing it would occur faster than it has, but more importantly that SANITY would begin to deal with mankind’s predicament. That adults would finally enter the room. I could not have been more wrong. Maybe the effects of Operation Epic Fail will finally nudge enough people over to the side of “this looks pretty serious”, and some mitigation can happen.
There’s another challenge in the mix these days – and that’s a lack of accurate data. When you live in an age where media is 90+ percent propaganda and all views are slanted, it’s difficult to deal with problems, and pretty much impossible to deal with predicaments.
Good luck to us.
You noted:
“the reaction is predictable: ‘But there has to be something!’ That’s where you see the power of the mythic narrative of progress, the faith-based credo at the heart of our culture’s pseudosecular belief system. Rationally speaking, no, there doesn’t have to be another energy source to replace the ones we’ve splashed around so improvidently. To insist that the universe has to give us as much cheap energy as we happen to want, just because we want it, is to surrender to the mental habits of a spoiled two-year-old.”
This immediately called to mind the underlying premise of much of New Thought, and especially its ancestor, Christian Science: the material world is entirely unreal, nothing other than a collective delusion, and it can be changed at will simply by changing how we think about it. As Mary Baker Eddy wrote not quite 150 years ago [my emphasis added]: “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal.”
It’s no wonder that the most common reactions to our predicament are those of a spoiled two-year-old.
Fifth Wednesday topic – a discussion of technologies that work, but are ignored or denigrated because their results can’t be explained by mainstream “science”. Homeopathy, is an example.
JMG, you referenced above the “narrative of progress, the faith-based credo at the heart of our culture’s pseudosecular belief system”. While I don’t doubt that this is true, I add that the American subcult of the religion of progress includes an equally unreasoning belief in the “free market”, an imaginary construct which doesn’t exist and never has. Just like Marxism, free market ideology is a European import. There is nothing American about it. Authorities in Vienna, around the turn of the 19thC. built public housing. Quite a lot of it, I gather. Austrian property owners resented what they experienced as govt. interference in their ability to extract as much rent as possible from hapless tenants. They hired a miserable scribbler named Hayek to craft an ideology which would at one and the same time justify their selfishness and appeal to the kinds of people–the small time intelligentsia–who look for easy answers to complex questions. Both of these fins de siècle cults moved to our shores, with the results we have seen.
Anthracite coal was mentioned above. According to the google article I read, the largest deposit of the resource is in NE Pennsylvania. Not a word about whom exactly owns it. Now to my simplistic brain, making America great again would need to BEGIN with asserting American ownership of American resources.
Though I know it’s not possible I want to vote against political or social topics for the fifth Wednesday. Just expressing an attitude.
Knowing that there are at least a few people out there who understand and accept what you are describing, is immensely relaxing. We’re not going to change human nature and bring a majority to understand the trajectory, even as it impacts them on a daily basis But we can arrange our own lives to be as rewarding as possible within the realities that we can’t change.
Here in Minnesota my government has decided that by 2040 the entire electrical grid has to run on wind, solar, and our as-of-now 2, nearly 70yr old nuclear facilities, at the same time they have negotiated at least ten AI data centers that would use as much electricity as the entire state uses right now.
The same people who believe this is reality, think that transing kids is being kind, men can become women, and there is no welfare fraud in Minnesota, it is just a vanity project by Trump who doesn’t like Tim Walz.
I’m less concerned about oil constraints, than these same folks deciding property confiscation is progressive. The choices I have made, I will be able to handle energy constraints and thrive. It is the madness of my neighbors that is the greater challenge.
I’ll confess that I was apocalyptic for around a decade. Slowly the evidence that fast collapse wasn’t happening changed my mind. Now I’m on board with the long descent. I may go read some of the old blog posts and compare and contrast what my reactions were then and what they are now. To my credit, I wasn’t a troll or yelling at the top of my virtual lungs. I just falsely believed a fast collapse was very likely. Thank you for your steadfast analysis.
Gunstone, of course. If it turns out that the estimate is accurate, that will keep the world running for another thirteen years at current rates of consumption. Now factor in the extremely high costs of drilling, pumping, and shipping that oil in Antarctic conditions, and you’ll see that this doesn’t contradict my model at all.
Drhooves, I remember when everyone in the peak oil scene was convinced that once we brought the facts to the attention of responsible people, then of course the necessary steps would be taken. Naive? You bet. One of the things we all have to grasp sooner or later is that where this sort of thing is concerned, there are no adults in the room, in the entire building, or on the rest of the planet.
Robert, true enough! New Thought in its classic form is the philosophy of an expanding society with effectively limitless resources. One of the reasons that classic form has had to be modified or discarded is that we no longer live in such conditions.
BeardTree, I’ve tabulated your vote.
Mary, confusing capitalism with a free market is an elementary mistake that Adam Smith himself corrected ably in The Wealth of Nations; he pointed out that no market is ever free, since if the government doesn’t interfere with it, businessmen will, using price fixing and other monopolistic practices. You’re right that capitalism can’t create resources that don’t exist, but of course neither can socialism — and most of the people who oppose capitalism are touchingly certain that all the world’s problems will go away if only we hand the means of production over to whatever bureaucracy is supposed to administer it in the name of “the people.” As for anthracite, sure, there’s still some. Do you know how much?
Frank, it’s easy to get caught up in apocalyptic beliefs, since they’re pushed so hard by our society. Good for you that you got out of that dead end!
Yes, Rome wasn’t built in a day neither did it fall in a day. A memory of something read years ago. One person thought an event meant Britain was finished in a situation. A famous person, forget who it was, responded, disagreeing, something like this – “There is much ruination in a nation”
There are a myriad of interests and motivations to keep our present industrial, technological, financial system going so the sudden collapse isn’t in the cards, though lurches and sputterings will multiply as time goes on.
@WHD #8: “I’m less concerned about oil constraints, than these same folks deciding property confiscation is progressive. The choices I have made, I will be able to handle energy constraints and thrive. It is the madness of my neighbors that is the greater challenge.”
I hear you, sir. It is so strange, but also, so predictable, that humans just collectively go insane in large masses, ever so often. Almost like catching a zombie mind virus. I do predict, however, here in America, that the socialist-leaning or aspiring hordes will ultimately (too) run into their own limits, in the form of the indomitable landscape and spirit of the country, which has been articulated and built up quite a lot, thanks to 250 years of cultivation.
@JMG – This was an elegant, classic, and virtuoso essay! Glad you are revisiting this. It is Astonishing how many people refuse to understand your basic stance, or address the evidence given for it. It doesn’t seem that complicated a point. But it bugs the Shale out of them, and learned obtuseness or feigned obliviousness must be some kind of human survival instinct mechanism in our wetware. In any case, bravo, well done, Loved this essay. Very astute, very helpful, too. I predict (btw) that Alien Intervention Cults will be the Go-To substitute, when AI falls flat, and Alternative Energy fails to deliver.
I’m not one who gets caught up or believes in the Mad Max fetish. Times change, the world adjusts, populations and civilizations adjust. Life moves on.
Recently I determined the yearly BTU’s produced by the burning of oil, natural gas, and coal. BTU is British Thermal Units, a measure of heat energy. I then found out the BTU’s available in the reserves of those fossil fuels. Even assuming substitution of coal (largest reserve of BTU’s) all easily gone in a century even with new discoveries. And the pinch of shortages and rising prices will come long before that point.
JMG
It won’t surprise me if the opening of the Strait of Hormuz leads to a temporary “oil surplus” as countries, economists, etc. take into account oil they had assumed would be tied up indefinitely so be prepared for more hand waving away of peak oil being “debunked by the experts.”
On a side note have you heard of the recent price hikes to luxury technologies (smartphones, PCs, video game consoles)? I think the inevitable collapse of the smartphone business model (which was always propped up by obscuring the cost to the consumer by offloading that cost onto the monthly service payments) might be enough to get people to realize that progress is a myth.
As for the fifth Wednesday post, I put my vote with BeardTree, although I think you could expand the topic an bit including technologies that work, but are currently being out competed due to temporary industrial technologies. One example I have is the pneumatic/air rifle and quick reloading crossbows. Today they’re novelties used by eccentric hunters in the backwoods, but in a future where the primer necessary to make modern bullets is no longer available they could become the ancestors of the future weapons of war. I’m pretty sure there are dozens of technologies that are like that.
What do you get when you cross a stirling engine with the fictional world of S. M. Stirling?
A big change where all high energy technology dies a mysterious death in the fire, society collapses, flesh eating zombies walk the earth, pseudosecularists become faux Celtic goddess worshippers in just a few years, everyone rides horses, and a new reactor is being built on the island of Nantucket.
BTW, are Space Bats coming back into popularity?
I enjoyed this essay, particularly the emphasis on distinguishing between the mythology surrounding peak oil and the underlying reality of declining net energy. However, I think one important factor deserves more weight.
The essay seems to dismiss climate change as largely a distraction or political narrative. Whether one agrees with every prediction about climate change or not, there is substantial evidence that the climate is changing and that the effects are becoming increasingly costly. From my perspective, climate change is not an alternative explanation for the long decline—it is another force that will shape it.
Declining energy availability, resource depletion, and climate change are not competing theories. They reinforce one another. A society with less surplus energy will find it harder to adapt to more frequent droughts, floods, wildfires, infrastructure damage, shifting agricultural zones, and rising insurance and disaster recovery costs. Likewise, the economic strain imposed by climate impacts leaves fewer resources available to invest in new energy systems or maintain existing infrastructure.
In that sense, climate change is not the cause of the long emergency, but it is likely to be one of the major factors determining how difficult that long emergency becomes. Recognizing that does not weaken the peak oil argument; if anything, it strengthens it by acknowledging that multiple long-term pressures are converging rather than operating in isolation.
Great post JMG!
I was warning my older sister that things look to be getting more expensive and difficult in the near future. She said “Things can’t get much more expensive. We can hardly afford to eat now.” I pointed out that things can get very much worse and mentioned that during the siege of Stalingrad, people took to eating prisoners of war. I don’t see us getting to the Stalingrad diet anytime soon, but this is a great time to be cautious.
I told my sister I would be happier if she had a big bag of rice and another of beans. She said she already has them.
What is coming is simply change. It means canning your own jam, having a little garden. Going on holiday to the local lake and not flying to Bali. “The road up the mountain and the road down the mountain are the same road.” We will just be walking backwards for a while and going to a simper state. I remember the 1970’s and it really was simpler and it was also okay.
Maxine
JMG,
The addition of the “climate change” trope has added to the confusion and disfunction over the effects of tightening global petroleum supply and its affects. Just yesterday I read that the University of Oregon has made the decision to redirect $20 million in student building funds to replace the perfectly serviceable natural gas boiler in the main campus heating plant with an electric one. They did not like that they had become the largest source of” climate change” gases in Eugene.
Once they get their dream electric boiler they can be smug in their virtue because they will be using electricity, possibly made down the road in Drain ( a real Oregon town), by a set of Pacific Power Natural Gas turbines. Ultimately this will raise the costs and move forward the future failure point of higher education.
5 Wednesday topic – how to sort out natural magic from marketing drek
“Trying to come up with something that can discover things humans can’t is the only option they can think of.”
There are other oracles than these for that, and much better I’d say. Dreams, prayer, etc.
On another note, something to share, I wrote an article on the topic of “Making it Small”
https://justinpatrickmoore.substack.com/p/making-it-small
https://justinpatrickmoore.substack.com/p/making-it-small
…because, as peak oil and other factors unfurl, “making it big,” while already a longshot for many artists and creatives, will be even a longer shot…
In the present climate, I would like to point out that Iran hasn’t been drilled and explored in a modern way in generations, but remains on tap in a savings bank. There are many such countries.
At the same time, the complete shut off of Hormuz and Gulf oil delivery had essentially no effect on modern life and patterns. Food remains near a 500-year low as % of income, for instance. (granted, it is slightly off the low now).
You can argue neither of these refute Peak Oil, however, it would seem to clearly refute any “Fast Collapse” scenario. …Which the media and “all the right people” are screaming about, again last month.
Alright, one more comment for now, my vote for 5th wed. once again floating the topic of Robert Graves and the polytheistic revival.
Hasn’t the price of goods risen largely due to the government printing money to paper over stock market crashes, apart from any physical supply issues?
Greetings JMG, thank you for the update on peak oil.
Do you think coal will be used a lot as a substitute for oil, and natural gas, once they decline significantly ?
I think coal is not simple to transform to oil, and factories will need to be transformed to use it .
Ps: I am not denying the reality of the decline in oil and gas , I am interested in what the next 20 years will look like
two words “dilithium crystals” ha ha ha .. It wasn’t until I was a grown up it finally dawned on me that that whole tv series empire was built on a fantasy land material….
@jmg — I know you are aware of tim morgan and his work on the seeds model. Looks like he dropped a long essay on his viewpoints — I think I’ll read that this afternoon (while hiding from the heat).
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2026/07/01/327-surplus-energy-economics/
ps — all 4 chickens are still going….3.5 years later — chickens are hearty!
Jerry
JMG,
One thing I am curious about is the consumption of the less-than-convenient alternatives to conventional crude oil that you discussed. When do we hit peak tar sands, peak natural gas liquids, peak shale oil etc, and how will that affect the process of economic slowing? It seems that these must have kept essential functions and activities propped up since 2005, but when is the point that even those are not worth extracting anymore? Just trying to understand the current phase of energy extraction. Thank you!
I vividly recall the Riot for Austerity from 20 years ago. I’ve also seen the results of demand destruction.
From my experience, watching friends and relatives, demand destruction because of price is the ONLY reason they’ll turn off lights in empty rooms, quit playing TVs in empty rooms, drive their kids to the school bus stop rather than let them walk the half block (before anyone carps about this, the neighborhood was as safe as it could get in Mount Joy township), consolidating driving, and everything else.
People change their behavior for two reasons: cost and ideology.
Changing behavior as in cutting back and conserving because of costs only works as long as costs stay high. The minute a cost changer can go back to the old ways, they often will.
Changing behavior for ideology — I want to save money for the future, my neighbors all quit hanging ten miles of Christmas lights, I want to help the planet — tends to last longer. You’ve changed your underlying motivation so you want it more and you’re willing to do more and sacrifice more to achieve your goal or support your values.
The U.S. Navy has many nuclear-powered submarines and more than a few surface ships.
That said, the navy uses nukes for subs because it’s what works to keep sailors alive underwater and the submarine operational for long periods of time. They make their own air.
Boomers (the ones loaded with intercontinental ballistic missiles) go out three months at a time without surfacing and never make port calls other than in their home port. When they return, they swap crews and head out again.
Fast attacks do surface and do make port calls and spend a correspondingly longer period at sea.
Sailors on subs go to nuke school to learn what to do. It’s hard and there’s a high failure rate.
The navy DOES NOT CARE about economics of running nukes. Naval priorities are quite different. Energy efficiency is nice and useful but it doesn’t hold a candle to projecting power from under the arctic circle.
I doubt that anything has changed since I was in the Navy from 1984 – 1993.
Also! To get people’s hair on fire: a very popular T-shirt design in Norfolk in the late 80’s was “24 empty missile tubes, a mushroom cloud, and now it’s Miller Time.” You can still find it online or in T-shirt shops where the owners don’t care about your delicate feelings and they do care about their customers who buy shirts like that.
A robust overview!
During the short window when I vainly hoped to convince people to take peak oil seriously, three arguments in particular come up over and over again (other than “there’s plenty of oil left”):
1. “As oil gets more expensive, that will make it worth extracting the harder-to-get oil.” This is quite correct and completely misses the point: it’s effectively saying that if we run out of cheap oil we’ll just replace it with expensive oil, as if that doesn’t completely change how we’ll have to use the oil.
2. “Technology will let us do more with less.” Yes, but not exponentially more, which is what we’d need to keep the party going long-term.
3. “Real nuclear power has never been tried.” Of course it’s never said so brazenly, but nuclear power has taken on a role in the technolibertarian mind akin to the dreams of a communist utopia in their opposites.
That’s all well said and very sensible and all, but: have we set the temperature correctly for the beetles? 😉
I have to say I’m really looking forward to these upcoming posts about revisiting your predictions and taking fresh stock of how it looks moving forward.
I had a bit of a grim thought about the apocalypse camp. (Yes, a grim thought about that otherwise joyful group.) To your knowledge, is there a correlation between people in that camp, and the type of ruthlessness and amorality that would do well in an “every man for himself” scenario?
I caught myself thinking something like that. I thought, “well if there’s an apocalypse, at least I won’t have to worry about getting arrested while I do what I need to do.” And that’s horrible. I’m not even really that kind of person. I’m more likely to be someone’s dinner in that scenario than anything else. But does it seem like that? Is it ruthless people who would do (relatively) well in an apocalypse that think such is coming?
I’m asking partly because I think an apocalypse is less unlikely than you do. I’m not a true believer and it’s mostly because we have very complex supply chains, which to me suggests we are more vulnerable to an abrupt systems failure than past societies were. If we too got to our peak solely by the usual “sunlight -> green plants -> herbivore” energy chain then I’d agree that the fate of past societies is a nigh 100% predictor of how our bumpity bump back down will go. As it is, I think it’s only about 70%.
That’s my intuition and not years of research talking though, so take that for what it’s worth. I believe my intuition, though.
JMB,
I think the Prosperity Gospel is the Christian sect of the “Faith in Progress”. Not only does it handle a strait line of history with no cyclical resets (even though resets are in the Old and New Testament but don’t tell them that. ) but you always get the ever increasing bounty you desreve.
Similarly I think the Cult of Meritocracy is the atheistic sect of the “Faith in Progress”. Pretty easy to hold onto merrit if the ground your on never shifts without your permission because all is progress.
One thing a lot of people missed back in 2005 is population contraction, particularly of those demographics that have the highest per capita energy consumption. This may ameliorate the energy per capita decline somewhat. (Though at some point the economies of scale go away – unlimited amounts of fossil fuels won’t help the proverbial person stuck on a desert island!)
JMG,
I thought the following tale from my short lived career as a salesman may be an amusing example of a bad ROI. A coworker of mine came up with a scheme to boost both her sales numbers and commission. She would spend all of her shift shopping at the store and “selling” things to herself. The amusing thing is that before she got fired, I would repeatedly see her try to calculate how many shifts a month would be needed to make this work and the answer was always “more than I already do”.
Consider the internal combustion engine. It was invented in the 1870s and the first car with it was built in the 1880s. However, it took decades for ICE-powered vehicles to replace animal power: it only happened in 1920s in the US and much later worldwide. So an observer in 1910 could’ve said that in spite of all the hype and investment this new tech was unlikely to become dominant. The growth from next to nothing to 11% of the world’s energy is *VERY* impressive.
Now, you’re right to point out that a lot of subsidies have been poured into renewables. If the value of the generated energy is less that the building costs, this growth doesn’t amount to much. However I find it hard to explain that countries as different as China, India, Brazil and the US are in the top-4 of countries by recent solar power installed capacity. Now it’s possible that special interests hijacked the energy policy of one major country forcing it to subsidise loss-making installations. But it would be really weird if it happened in pretty much all the major powers, including ones that aren’t rich.
I accidentally read this when reading Teresas comment. I had to reblur my eyes to get it right
Boomers (the ones loaded with money from when things were booming, I know not all of the generation partook of the spoils) go out three months at a time on Alaskan cruises without thinking of where all the lobster and steaks they are eating come from, happy to puke it up along with the wine and liquor, as they try to get a younger woman into bed with them, making sure their viagra prescriptions are filled before they leave the port. When they return, they swap wives, pay divorce settlements, and head out again, like nothing ever happened.
I’m going to push back on alternatives in one, very specific way. When I look at something like a wind turbine or solar panel, I don’t see an energy panacea, I see a battery. While the energy inputs needed to create them might exceed what energy they could ever produce (and I’m skeptical that that’s completely accurate in a well-maintained system even when you factor in batteries), the drawdown on energy capital is much more managed. For example, I could run a small DC system in an off grid cabin strictly on “renewable” tech quite comfortably. A setup like that could last me decades. If I had the same amount of refined crude needed to build that system handed to me on day one, it’s doubtful I’ll get as much of a return out of it. Now mind, this is as much a matter of scale as it is of frugality. No way that kind of system is going to power industrial life in NYC. But in my little cabin? A system like that is quite cozy.
Regarding nuclear fission: Some folks cite the Manhattan Project as an example, as in “we just need another Manhattan Project to address our energy issues.” In reality, the entire Manhattan Project, all the scientists in Los Alamos, all the workers in Oak Ridge and Hanford, all the miners in who knows where, came up with…two bombs (three if you count the Gadget).
5th Wednesday topic: a discussion of blue-collar jobs/skilled trades, and apprenticeships thereof.
Why blue-collar work is the best bet for current age-group 12 to 30. Why those jobs pay well, now and later.
Jobs where one actually does something important:
Some, not all:
bookkeeper/accounting clerk (for those who sit)
canaler
car mechanic
carpenter (many categories, ie woodworker; framer)
chicken tender
CNC operator (Computer Numerical Control)
cook
construction, house (many categories)
dressmaker/seamstress
drywaller
electrician
farmer
general store tender
glazier
guard (prison, bank)
handyman/handywoman/repairer/mechanical maintenance
HVAC heating & cooling
husbandry tender (horse; donkey)
irrigation tender
janitor/custodian/cleaner
livestock tender
millwright/machinist
nurse
plumber/pipefitter
police officer/sheriff
road layer
roofer
school teacher
sider of houses
smithy (black; white)
tailor? (hoity-toity)
typist
welder
💨🧹🍳🏡👨🏼🏫💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Thank you very much for this review of our energy predicament and the lost time to go to a realistic approach onto it.
I am a physicist by profession, so let me do a short comment on the hype with small modular reactors.
First I don’t get it what is any better with ten little Fukushimas relative to one big one. Sorry for the quip.
But most importantly the (nuclear) fuel efficiency of the SMR concepts I have looked at are even worse than the classic pressurized light water reactor.
But uranium ore is a very very scarce resource on planet earth.
Interestingly most of the SMRs call for medium enriched uranium (some 20% or so, we are there in close to bomb enrichment territory) which isn’t even commercially available in the US any more.
And Russia is prohibited to deliver for political reasons. That seems to be a main reason, why all this over-hyped projects are already coming to a screeching halt.
And yes Fusion, I don’t see it.
But I think that your view of renewables is a bit to pessimistic.
Say the Dutch Windmill of its time (16th century) was obviously technical feasible and most probable economic too.
So if we even fall back to this, that is way above a Mad Max scenario.
As a slogan, say: Back to the future, everything renewable was yesterday!
I think that in our times renewables are a kind of fossil fuel extenders. They cannot stay on their own feet for now.
But IMHO they are even more important than unconventional oil to stabilize our economic world system and mitigate the slow but relentless decent of fossil fuels availability.
Renewables will most probably not allow us to continue the lavish lifestyle most westerners are accustomed to.
But there’s a realistic chance to find some new sustainable equilibrium even above the Dutch Windmill I think (or hope).
As you say, there is a world between doom and tomorrow land, and that is the realistic one.
JMG: “A word or two probably needs to be said about the role of high technology in all this. Right now vast amounts of money are being poured into the quest for artificial general intelligence (AGI)—a machine that can outthink humans. ”
From zerohedge:
“A new analysis from Laine AI suggests that AI-related errors in U.S. court filings are no longer isolated incidents but a rapidly expanding trend. Drawing on hundreds of confirmed cases, the study finds that courts are seeing a growing number of filings containing fabricated citations, inaccurate legal authorities, and other AI-generated mistakes as lawyers and self-represented litigants increasingly incorporate generative AI into their work.”
“The authors conclude that AI can remain a valuable legal research tool, but only if every citation, quotation, and legal authority is independently verified before being submitted to a court.”
And from the AI company:
“About Laine AI
Laine AI is a legal technology company focused on improving the accuracy and reliability of AI-assisted legal work. It delivers tools that help legal teams detect errors, verify citations, and reduce risk in court filings”
“AI-related filing errors tend to fall into a few clear categories, with fabrication standing out as the most common. It accounts for 624 mentions, or 51.7% of all recorded mistakes.”
and
“Legal teams should therefore treat every AI-generated citation as unverified until checked, using a mix of trusted research tools and review processes before submission.”
Good gods…Fabrication is not an ‘error’ or ‘hallucination’!
The twisting of language is beginning to boil my piss.
Some potential efficacy as a glorified search engine.
Beyond that, I am currently trending with Ron M (#440 june open post) and Ripley from Aliens:
“I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit… it’s th3e only way to be sure”
All votes have been tabulated; thank you.
BeardTree, exactly. The fast-collapse types point out that there are many factors pushing society toward collapse. The progress-uber-alles crowd point out that society has many ways to push back against those factors to maintain stability. Both are right, and a ragged decline, the midpoint where those two sets of factors come into balance, is the result.
Celadon, alien cargo cults are already in existence and well distributed, of course, so I’m quite sure you’re right. I’m waiting for the first fringe thinker to combine UFOs with the flat earth theory and proclaim that there’s an infinite number of worlds like ours, all on a vast flat surface extending forever in all directions, and flying saucers will surely show up any day now to whisk us away to one where nobody’s pumped the oil yet. It’s the basic mindset of modernity reduced to a nice clear absurd image.
Tim, delighted to hear it. I’m sorry to say you’re in the minority, though.
BeardTree, yes, and even if you factor in the certainty of new discoveries, it’s not that much better. Here’s the Hubbert curve, from Hubbert’s original paper:
All the area to the right of “proven reserves” is oil nobody had discovered yet, and it doesn’t change things. The same is true of every fossil fuel.
Anon, I think it’s quite likely that the reopening of the Hormuz bottleneck will cause one more oil glut, and that’s why I’m getting this started now. The aftermath of the glut will be another price spike. Yes, I’d heard of the soaring prices of technotrinkets; I don’t know if that, or anything, will be enough to make people recognize that progress is a mythology that’s passed its pull date, but it’s likely to drive adoption of a new wave of simpler and more resilent technologies.
Justin, no doubt. I still treasure the tirade I fielded when somebody sent Stirling a copy of my deindustrial novel Star’s Reach. He was apparently happy to play with the notion that advanced technology might go away, but only as a can’t-possibly-happen sort of make-believe; suggest that we’re on our way there and we’re not going to the stars, and he had not merely a cow but a whole herd. As for space bats, good question. I’d have to find a publisher.
Jim, I see you haven’t read my recent writings on climate change. You might find these of interest:
https://ecosophia.net/riding-the-climate-toboggan/
https://ecosophia.net/climate-change-the-crisis-management-model/
https://ecosophia.net/climate-change-an-unwelcome-future/
https://ecosophia.net/mitigation-and-other-unspeakable-horrors/
The short form? Climate change is real, it’s anthropogenic, it’s not the world-ending cataclysm that certain well-funded actors have been conjuring up to push a political agenda of their own, it’s simply one part of the broader global polycrisis of industrial civilization. Oh, and mitigation is a real option.
(That said, there was a systematic and rather well-funded effort in 2011 and 2012 to pressure peak oil writers to shut up about peak oil and join the climate change chorus instead. I was there at the time, you know. I’ll be writing about that in an upcoming post.)
Maxine, I also remember the 1970s, and yes, it was okay; in many ways, in fact, it was a better time to be alive than, say, now. I’m glad to hear that your sister has had the brains to stockpile some food; steps like that will give society more resilience than any number of government programs run by overpaid cubicle fauna.
Clay, that’s just absolutely classic. Due to transmission losses over the electricity grid, the U of O will be making a bigger contribution to climate change than it is now — but they can pretend that it’s not them, because somebody else is running the machinery.
Justin, the reason the current generation of technofetishists aren’t turning to dreams, prayer, or the like is that those won’t give them the answers they want. So they look for a machine that will lie to them, and can be presumed to be smart enough to make the lies true. Not a good idea!
Dzanni, exactly. They don’t refute peak oil — there’s as much production after the peak as before it — but they do refute a fast collapse; that’s precisely that I’m saying.
Patrick, until the real economy of resources and energy began to contract, they didn’t have to print money by the ream to cover those over.
Tony, coal is already being used as fast as it can be mined. Converting it into oil can be done, but at a frightful cost in net energy — that’s why Nazi Germany ran out of fuel for its tanks and planes, despite huge coal reserves and a massively funded coal-to-oil project using the most advanced coal liquification technology in the world.
Jerry, ha ha ha indeed. You’d be amazed — or maybe not — by the number of people who assume that something must be possible because they watched it in that wretched series. Thanks for the heads up about Tim’s essay, and huzzah for the chickens!
Stephen, those figures are complex, because how much of each of them is economical to extract depends on a galaxy of factors including the current price of oil, the cost of extraction for specific reserves, how the hydrocarbons available from each reserve matches up to global demand for different fractions, etc. If somebody’s worked out a meaningful estimate I haven’t seen it yet.
Teresa, a friend of mine years ago was an assistant cook on a fast-attack sub, and had similar things to say. Did you serve on boomers, then?
Slithy, yeah, every one of these (including the “plenty of oil” shuck) is painfully familiar to me. They’re the four horsemen of Not Getting It.
Cynthia, the great beetle civilization that will arise after we go extinct will doubtless set the planet’s thermostat to suit themselves, though I don’t think Lovecraft mentioned that detail. As for apocalypse believers, a minority of them seem to be the ruthless types who concern you. Most are engaged in provisional living — the habit, very common among our species, of postponing one’s dreams until after “something happens” which isn’t going to happen. “I’ll have the life of my dreams when I lose twenty pounds” (which the person makes sure never to lose) is one form of this; “I’ll have the life of my dreams when the world crashes into ruin” (which it won’t) is another form.
GlassHammer, two direct hits.
Roldy, yes, very much so. I predicted depopulation back in 2007 —
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2007-06-12/depopulation-explosion/
— and it’s another factor in my predictions of a long, slow, ragged collapse. More on this as we proceed!
Four Sided, oh good heavens. That’s classic!
Alex, that 11% is a very mixed bag. It’s wind, plus solar, plus geothermal, plus biomass, plus cogeneration, plus every other niche energy source. The Irish power plants that are stripping peat bogs down to the subsoil are included there, and so are the Brazilian plants that burn leftovers from sugar cane processing, and on down the list. Some of those make a profit. Others are viable because international lenders offer loans for such installations. Still others are good ways to score points with the United Nations et al. By the way, solar power has been under development since Mouchot’s first solar steam engine in 1861 — it’s considerably older than the internal combustion engine — and windpower is older still, so your comparison doesn’t work as well as you seem to think.
Mark, I’m glad to hear this, not least because I made the same point in 2006:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-08-09/why-renewable-energy-matters/
We’ll be discussing that in detail later on.
Roldy, yep. I like to point out in response how much money we poured into the War On Cancer, and what we got in return, i.e., more cancer.
ChristianFW, thank you for this — that was certainly my impression about the small nukes, and it’s good to hear that confirmed by someone with credentials. As for renewables, of course they have considerable potential. The problem is that nearly all renewable installations these days are intended to power the electric grid, which they do very poorly and very inefficiently. Using wind and water power directly as mechanical energy (e.g., in mills and factories), and using solar power as a source of moderate heat (e.g., household hot water and many industrial processes), are very efficient and can be the basis for an industrial society (cough, cough, 18th century Britain and New England before steam engines were perfected); it’s just that all the money’s going in the wrong direction. More on this as we proceed!
Earthworm, all this, curiously enough, supports the odd notion that LLMs are infested by evil spirits. Satan is the father of what?
This post made me think of a crucial opening scene in the opening film of the long and highly influential Marvel Cinematic Universe movie series. In it Tony Stark, genius inventor and Faust-figure par excellence, builds a fist-sized nuclear fusion reactor *in a cave* while being held prisoner by Afghan thugs. This allows him to power a rudimentary hand-forged ‘Iron Man’ armored suit, which he uses to escape the cave, perfect the suit design in his Malibu workshop, and become the techno-superhero Iron Man.
Every other major plot point in the sequence of twenty-odd superhero movies that follow (2008-2019) is ultimately powered by 1) Tony Stark’s limitless nuclear energy, 2) various bits of alien technology that are essentially magic, and 3) Tony Stark’s limitless ego. He also manages to create general AI about midway through the series, which, wowzer, turns out to be hostile to human life and must be battled and defeated in the usual way.
I know it seems like a digression from the sorts of high culture usually discussed here, but it would be hard to imagine a more vivid statement of the popular mythologies of our time. Basically if you give unlimited power to the right group of plucky individuals, they can punch the right bad guys in the mouth and solve all problems with the help of hand-wavy technological wizardry and tactical plans that seem designed to maximize collateral damage.
On a related note, I’ve long dreamed of writing ‘The Secret Key to the Occult Meaning of Marvel’, in which I demonstrate conclusively that the superhero Avengers are actually a popularized mythological account of an esoteric fraternity who developed unusual powers in order to protect humanity from astral invaders. But alas, finding an audience who would appreciate that specific overlap of topics seems unlikely 🙂
Robert Mathiesen #3: This forum has been helpful for me in putting a name to the way many of my friends think. Although ‘New Thought’ is not a phrase I think I’ve ever heard spoken aloud, most of my friends who are on the counter-cultural end of things talk casually about ‘manifesting’, meaning, essentially, getting what they want from the Universe by thinking about it hard enough. It’s helpful to see that this is essentially the same attitude as ‘Technology will give us whatever we want if we just invest in it hard enough’. The sad problem is that from within this worldview you can’t think your way out of it, because doubts and counter-arguments are ‘negative thinking’ and will only spur more intense efforts at wishful ideation. I don’t put much effort into challenging my friends on this topic. It seems counter-productive.
William Hunter Duncan #8: I heartily agree that the whole process of navigating peak oil is complicated immensely not by the geological and economic factors involved, which are chancy enough, but by the behaviour of increasingly fearful and desperate people. In my own forecasts I really had not imagined how bizarre it could get. Personally I think the entire Covid episode was a mass psychosis event triggered by a subconscious crisis of faith within the religion of Progress. And further, I think that future spasms of this psychological crisis will be equally unpredictable.
John,
I look forward to an update. I have a dog eared copy of The Long Descent I read thru from time to time to remain grounded. I have a tendency to drift towards a rapid decline scenerio in my perspective that causes me to lose my tranquility. Your perspective is always thoughtful, balanced and grounded in history.
Thanks,
Tom
Clay at #20;
That is funny. Burn the gas yourself for 90% efficiency to heat, or burn the gas to make electricity at 50% (at best) efficiency and then buy the electricity. Brilliant. I suppose they think they will use the hydropower, except that’s all been fed to the datacenters, or the solar panels, (In the Northwest winter?) or wind (that just went away for a week.) What they need to do is put the data center in the middle of the campus and use that for heat.
As for coal to liquids, that’s old technology and works. The cost is 25% of the energy in the coal plus the cost of building the plant. It will keep the military planes running though.
Mind-blowing factoid, ” The German Wehrmacht utilized between 2.5 and 2.75 million horses throughout World War II. Despite the popular myth of a fully mechanized Blitzkrieg, Germany’s military remained overwhelmingly horse-drawn, with equines supplying between 80% and 90% of the army’s logistical and transportation needs.”
That’s one reason they lost. They did have coal to oil up and running, but it wasn’t enough.
If the apocalypse happens today, you don’t have to go into work tomorrow. This is a large part of the apocalypse fantasy’s appeal.
Hello, JMG and commenters:
Peak oil is “dead”…Long life to peak oil!
“What gets missed in this kind of conversation is that the the people who promoted and believed in the doomsday cult didn’t understand peak oil.”
A painful truth for former believers in apocalyptic fantasies, and their “optimist” rivals. Even people with an apparent sound sciences education fell in this easy mind trap named “doomerism”. Let’s draw a veil over “old good times of peak oil “community”, decades ago. I still feel a vicatious embarrassment when I remember it again…
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“the future of the internet once it stopped getting vast direct and indirect subsidies”
Oh, that unreliable future of the internet meant to open a can of worms, in the small Spanish language peak oil “community”, during first decade of current century. I remember very well how many peakers supported the “serious” idea that internet to some extent would survive the peak oil (ahem) without dramatic problems…Opposite reasonings werre despised with a shallow rationalization of usual nerds fondness to hi tech (cough).
**********************************************
“most of what’s left is lignite, which gives much less energy when burnt—so much so that there are plenty of lignite deposits that aren’t worth mining, because you get less energy from them than it takes to get them out of the ground.”
Yes, indeed Spain has some “good” lignite fields yet, but a heck of mines here have been closed from some years ago, due to their economic lack of benefit (official explanation of their closure); but their lesser energy profit seems a very reasonable “elephant in the room”.
Hi John, happy to be back on the subject and taking a measured view of the long descent (some wise guy came up with that term, trying to remember who…). You’ve previously written about green wizardry and practical steps to “collapse now and avoid the rush”. My vote for the fifth Wednesday would be for more of this kind of practical steps discussion, if you’ve got anything new to say about it. Thanks!
Good Afternoon JMG,
Great post, I look forward to seeing your new changes and predictions, especially past 2035. From a geopolitical-analytical perspective, almost all the major analyses only go to 2035. I understand that major event dynamics will be different then – as that’s when shale will be running low, coinciding with the U.S.’s millennial population bump starting to bite and we look demographically like Japan did ~2020. Add both of those to the weaking of U.S. military capacity and the far from certain outcomes of major wars, besides everybody losing, it seems there will be a major bump in global decline before then.
Perhaps demand destruction from lower population could mitigate resource constraints. However, it will probably take until the 2040s before the U.S. can benefit from a smaller “retirement” cohort than workers and consumers. In the meantime, demand destruction is mostly affecting schools and youth activities.
I’ve done everything I personally can to protect my family and be useful in whatever final form the late 2020’s crisis takes. I intend to do my part to win the best feasible future available to us.
Justin Patric Moore #16 … HA! Funny you should mention ‘Stirling(s)’. I’m currently reading the 4th book in that series.
Fifth Wednesday: a magical/occult commentary on the Zen Oxherding Pictures
I will admit that it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that you weren’t discussing a swift collapse. I could tell that things were seriously wrong with our society, but I didn’t have the tools to comprehend just what was going on, and in the meantime I was emotionally invested in some sort of apocalypse to get me out of the miserable state I was in.
I have noticed, though, when I try to talk to other people about the basics of peak oil theory and civilizational decline, well… I may as well be instructing my dogs in calculus. And I mean literate, college-educated people literally cannot comprehend the basic idea of ‘in the future, everything will be a little worse.’
My suggestion for a 5th Wednesday post: the importance of micro-climates and/or biological refugia as it pertains to species viability/speciation.
@Dylan #44
I think you’re misremembering the early scenes of the first Iron Man (not that it really matters): as I remember it, he originally used something like car batteries to power a crude electromagnet to draw shrapnel away from his heart. That he rigged it all up by hand showed that he really was a Genius(TM) and not just a slick executive.
But more interesting is what happened after: after escaping, he comes back to civilization a Changed Man(TM) and resurrects an old “arc reactor” project — which is not explicitly nuclear, it’s just pure handwavium. Importantly, this project had been shelved because it would have made energy too cheap, which the older profit-driven Tony Stark didn’t approve of.
This is an example of a long-running conspiracy theory, which is that there are cheap sources of abundant energy just waiting to be turned online but a shadowy conspiracy of fossil-fuel executives and/or anti-nuclear cultists keep preventing that from happening, either because fossil fuels are more profitable or because the dirty hippies are deranged and also somehow have immense influence in the halls of power (but only with regards to nuclear, apparently).
JMG,
Is this also why the Prosperity Gospel sect and the Cult of Meritocracy are not very giving, even to their own communities? (If you share blessings as an agent of the Lord …. well your interfering with the Progress of His designs. If you give to a charity you are giving to those without merit and interfering with human Progress.)
Hi JMG,
I’m grateful you are returning to the topic of peak oil and economics as it feels timely to me. For the fifth Friday post in July, I vote for an exploration of as you called it “the tangled emotional roots” of apocalyptic belief from your perspective.
~Angelica
The sum of “Solar, Wind, Other” and “Nuclear” in the graph shown is larger than 15%, the paragraph commenting it needs to be revised.
Hi JMG,
Thanks for this post. I’m glad to see you return to this topic. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, myself, in the last year or so and I’m grateful to get your take on the current situation and to have people to discuss it with.
I want to call to your attention, and to that of the commentariat, someone who has been doing a lot of work on this in the last 10 years. His name is Simon Michaux. He from Australia, lives in Finland now, and has a PhD in mining. He works for the Geological Survey of Finland. His main page is here: https://www.simonmichaux.com/. He has a reports page located here: https://www.simonmichaux.com/reports where he keeps most of the work he has completed. While all of his work is well worth checking out, I want to bring to your direct attention his report titled “Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuels”, which can be found here: https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf. This is a 1,000-page report that describes in precise detail what it would take to replace current capacity with renewables and why, for all practical purposes, this is impossible. You might also find his report titled “Oil from a Critical Raw Materials Perspective” interesting. It is located here: https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/70_2019.pdf.
I very much look forward to this weeks discussions.
Beardtree 14
> BTU is British Thermal Units
Thank you‼️I noticed👍🏼.
💨🔠💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@ Dylan #44
“…in order to protect humanity from astral invaders.”
By “astral invaders” do you mean the kind that you encounter in your dreams?
That is an intriguing premise, by the way. 🙂
@Polecat: The fourth book is where I gave up on the series. Too many cannibal / zombies for me to even read anymore without it being an outright horror novel. The first three had been entertaining in their way, even if unbelievable IMO.
@JMG: The technofetishits are flirting with psychosis. Rhyd Wildermuth ran a good article about this break recently titled “The Lying Oracle” and how the missing element is getting guidance from our own unconscious and beyond…
https://rhyd.substack.com/p/the-lying-oracle
@JMG
Steampunk, or rather, tech that is functionally equivalent to steampunk, is the tech of the ecotechnic future. I can very well imagine India in 2850 CE, with sailing ships using mechanical control systems that incorporate the knowledge of modern 21st-century control theory (which, believe me, is VERY sophisticated in a mathematical sense) for sailing to different far-flung lands with riverine transport for internal transport; interestingly, in this vision, air transport is not to be left behind, and thus hot-air balloons are widely used by the Indian Air Force, in addition to the “flying cars that already exist”, i.e. airships, but again, these airships have had a lot of post-Hindenburg crash R&D into and knowledge of, control systems, materials science, thermodynamics and fluid- and solid mechanics built into the design process, so they’re a lot safer, and those who want to travel “business class” travel by them, whether domestically or internationally (this solves some traffic problems, and creates others – welcome to the world of 3D traffic flow).
Medicines, meanwhile, are from the Ayurvedic/Siddha traditions, but with a twist – they are studied from the POV of 21st-century systems biology, and thus are robustly backed by scientific evidence (I can say this with confidence as I used to work in biomedical research where I built computer models to test medicines, and I am confident that Ayurveda/Western herbalism medicines work in an actual sense, and not the placebo, and that it’s a case of “we know they work, but we just don’t know how”, and here it is systems biology that comes to the rescue).
Mathematics, meanwhile, is a lot less focused on energy-intensive numerical crunching, and is done a lot more akin to what modern-day idiots like me do, like solving partial differential equations using Bessel functions, with the accompanying tables, of course.
Finally, real estate problems are a lot less severe. 20th- and 21st-century research into fluid dynamics, reactive gas dynamics and solid mechanics, and applied research into balloons, etc. have given a sufficiently-robust knowledge base for Indian civil engineers to build entire aerostat towns and villages, which are connected by hot-air balloons and airships; and, as can be expected from Indian architecture, there is a renaissance in traditional Hindu architecture, which thus ensures that new regional styles make these aerostat towns and villages look genuinely aesthetic as opposed to the Stalinist block architecture that passes for “modern buildings” in many Indian cities today.
@ Robert #3 and @ Dylan #45
(Re New Thought…) “The sad problem is that from within this worldview you can’t think your way out of it, because doubts and counter-arguments are ‘negative thinking’ and will only spur more intense efforts at wishful ideation.”
This just helped me make sense of a New Thought prison in which a friend of mine with a serious health problem tragically appears to be trapped. Thank you both for the perspective.
Robert, in relation to Ms Eddy’s pronouncement that only spirit is real and matter isn’t… It strikes me that even if you believe that matter is simply a denser form of spirit, you might occasionally stop to wonder if spirit has reasons (reasons that seem good to it/him/her) for self-imposing the limits upon itself that matter represents.
Our predicament also explains why increasing numbers of people believe that the population is being deliberately reduced (take your pick: via COVID or bioweapons generally, euthanasia, encouragement of sexual behaviors that lead away from reproduction, etc.). Reduce the population until the remaining resources can still support an Elysium-like lifestyle, rely on robots to replace the skilled labor that died out in the culling, and have a Micawberlike faith that “something will turn up” before the elite survivors have to again face the music of musical chairs. Because replacing human labor with AGI robots might take some time, the interim solution is to tightly control the population with social credit-based money and 15-minute cities before enough of the “peasants” get wise and storm the castle.
Conspiracies aside, estrogen-mimics seem to be doing a fine job of reducing fertility as an unexpected consequence of first-world industrial products; and the chaos in the bumpy ride ahead could well result in population reducing wars and famines. What’s far less clear is whether islands of prosperity could arise and survive in the long term.
“I like to point out in response how much money we poured into the War On Cancer, and what we got in return, i.e., more cancer.” Well, I can’t entirely agree with you there, as both my wife and I have been cured of cancer (undetectable for decades). It depends on what kind you get and how early it’s caught. (Jimmy Carter’s another example – he survived his cancer by over a decade and died of something else.) That said, I’m sure the Shirky Principle’s in effect throughout the relevant organizations!
I don’t think the real problem is the total amount of oil and other carbon-related energy sources left in the world. It’s much more about where they are and what they can do. One of the few positive things to have come out of the ghastly Iran fiasco is a degree of forcible education of pundits about the different types of petroleum products, what they are used for, and how they are transported. They are just beginning to wake up to the fact that petrol isn’t produced in petrol stations. Moreover, different types of petroleum products are all produced in different places and have to be refined in different ways. Oil does not move itself, either from producing to non-producing countries, or within countries. In effect, it takes oil to move oil. Oil that cannot be transported might as well not be there.
In our splendid, neoliberal just-in-time economy, we rely on prompt delivery of everything, and this includes direct petroleum products as well as derivatives like sulphuric acid, without which much of world industry shuts down. Whilst the Hormuz crisis has made people realise this, the problem isn’t new. In France, quite small problems in fuel supply led to supermarkets closing and throwing food away. The average major city has between one and three days of stocks of food available, depending on where in the world you are. We don’t have to suppose a sudden general shortage of oil, just temporary shortages of certain types at certain places. So the Greater Tokyo conurbation has about fifteen million people, and grows more or less no food (you’ll understand why if you’ve seen it.) The food comes from elsewhere in the country or is imported, and is brought to the shops mostly by lorries using diesel. Think how much diesel it takes to move that much food every day. Without oil you have no electricity, without electricity no transport system, no traffic lights, no lifts in forty-floor buildings, no functioning hospitals. Whether a city that had been without fuel for a week could ever be inhabited again is an open question. And that means regular supplies of petroleum products, every day for the foreseeable future. Yes, there are strategic stocks but you need electricity to access them and fuel to distribute the fuel. I’m not worried about apocalypse tomorrow, I’m worried about unpredictable mini-apocalypses from time to time
Seconded: “Fifth Wednesday: a magical/occult commentary on the Zen Oxherding Pictures”
I had a recent conversation with a resident of the Irish county of Kerry, who claimed “we’ve got massive oil fields right off our coast that’ll sort everything as soon as we get them up and running.”
I told him that I was working as a ship’s agent in the (tiny, but convenient) fishing port of Killybegs during the years 1998 to 2004, and at that time a great deal of offshore oil exploration drilling was occurring around 60 miles from our port… supply ships (mostly from Aberdeen in Scotland) were landing in our port with equipment destined for the oil rigs, and one of my jobs was to register all of these with the local customs office in the “end use” category (this would mean they could avoid all tax and duty being levied). I was even invited to go on a tour of one of the drilling rigs, which was fascinating – a long noisy helicopter ride to and from, three changes of clothes – into helicopter survival suits for both legs of the trip, and rigger safety gear for the walking tour around the rig.
Anyway, because of our close working exposure to one small slice of the oil exploration industry we knew some things… 1) if the price of oil drops too low, exploration stops. If it rises too high, the economy crashes. There is a sweet spot for oil prices that keep both exploration and economy ticking along; 2) all thought that the oil found in, on, or around a country “belongs” to the people of that country should be quashed, because that country’s minister will sell licences to explore and to drill the oil to the highest bidder cheaply (or face expensive consequences); and 3) the KIND of oil that has been found off of the Irish coast is EXPENSIVE oil. It is located under 1-3 km of seawater AS WELL as under another thickness of crust (the thickness of which escapes my memory, but not easily drilled). Most of the wells that were discovered during the explorations that we serviced from our fishing port were subsequently capped, and (essentially) “banked” for some future when it might become economic to recover them. I’m not sure what that future might look like, but it may turn out to be well past the time when oil and gas, and their downstream industrial products, are accessible by price to MOST Irish people.
PS, since you mentioned it, I will tell you that it is very hard to find Irish people who care too much about the bogs being mined for electricity supply – the bogs in question are mainly located in the Irish equivalent of “flyover country” – ie in the flat centre of the country which has been depopulating faster than the coasts for decades. The first peat burning Irish electric power plant went into operation in around 1950, so it is not a new technology. In terms of numbers of local jobs provided vs basic ecological destruction the “bigger picture” situation – including politics and culture and the way the rest of the country thinks of the matter – might compare best with the Kentucky mountain top removal coal mining industry.
@JMG – I have wondered (a couple of times) if one of the reasons that the “Future can’t be faced”, is that it clearly means not only the end of the First World, but also, the Third. At least, those countries will NEVER be attaining those lifestyles, that we surreptitiously stole from them, and were in the process of sharing back (so goes the narrative), and will reassume something resembling their “old” form. The great hope of the “Other” attaining (too) a spot in the Faustian pantheon, meant that all the casualties in the “War on Nature” were so worth it, as it is the universal apotheosis of man. If that were not true, this means the First World sin can never be forgiven, and (even more of a double bind), that the End of Progress might have been hastened by guilt, the same guilt which motivated the yearning for much of that Progress to begin with. Also, biological realities like War, Famine, Plague, and Disaster, will likely resume their past suzerainty over the entire race of man, an affront to us all.
Anonymous # 15:
“One example I have is the pneumatic/air rifle and quick reloading crossbows. Today they’re novelties used by eccentric hunters in the backwoods, but in a future where the primer necessary to make modern bullets is no longer available they could become the ancestors of the future weapons of war.”
I’m a peaceful guy, IMHO, but I’ve used during my younger times low power air rifles and guns for my amusement. I can say here they’re only legal for average population, when they aren’t powerful enough, so I’ve only shot to bullseyes. Indeed, it’s also legally banned to hunt small animals (like rabbits or pidgeons) with these “toys”, unles you’ve got a hunting license. I think another countries (for example, maybe in Argentina?) allows small game under some lighter conditions.
Current laws here let air rifles/pistol under 24.2 Joules, for general people identifying yourself during the purchasing, and asking for a quite easy license. There’s a few air arms used by shoot sports, too. These sportists usually need also a sport federation license. Of course, I know there are some high power air rifles, able to hunt big game preys, and they can be improved in the future. However, their use for hunting its anecdotal here, and they’re equated in legal permissions to fire arms (you also need a “serious” hunting license, a compulsory insurance, and some more bureaucratic permissions).
You can bet criminal underworld doesn’t usually take care of legal measures, so…
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I also vote, like you, for apparently “obsolete” technologies which will become more interesting when Faustian faith in hi tech “solutions” have declined further in the future; for the fifth Wednesday post.
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Jim E. # 18:
“there is substantial evidence that the climate is changing and that the effects are becoming increasingly costly.”
OK, I also think climate change is a real and serious problem…but this hard fact doesn’t prevent me to check mainstream ecologism (for example, in the Greta Thunberg strident mood), often has overstated the likely timeline and the next consequences of it. So ironically, I can point a lot of ecologists are kidnapped (like peak oil doomers) in an apocalytic not true narrative, in which soon we’ll be everybody dead, or at least surviving near North and South Pole (last places to live as human beings?). I’m not making up anything: if you look at past and present day predictions by some ecologism activists, doomerism isn’t strange within them. Failed apocalyptic predictions can discredit easily ecologist activism and peak oil theory alike, and ironically again, to favor denialism against the two topics alike. It’s like the old tale titled “Peter and the Wolf”.
While on my 7 week bicycle camping trip got a real education on how folks in Sicily and northern Italy live. Old houses renovation. Some are 200years old from comments. Thick walls. Secure bars on windows, heavy doors. Solar hot water very common. Washing machine but air dry laundry. Food quality noticeable better and socializing over a leisurely meal. No 8 min inhale unknown food. The young- lean, fit,intelligence, no tattoos, limited smartphone time, rare graffiti…adults stern, wary with outsiders. Startled at how few kids and families from Sicily to northern Germany i saw. As a father of 4 I notice things. So our spoilt conspicuous consumption in Canuckistan salary class are in for a hard adjustment.
Lots of very small cars, tiny trucks, scooters as gasoline is $3.50 per litre so traffic is thin. No road rage.
It wasn’t peak total oil, but it was peak cheap oil.
Solar + batteries is now cheaper than coal.
JMG,
One of the huge problems with the compact scalable nukes is that no matter what size they are they are only devices to generate hot radioactive steam. This steam must be fed through two other devices to generate electricity.
The first is a steam generator, which is a kind of heat exchanger which transfers the heat from hot radioactive steam in to hot non-radioactive steam. These are very technical and must be made of exotic materials like Zirconium to avoid being quickly degraded by radioactivity. The Trojan power plant was decommissioned because it’s steam generator developed cracks and the radioactivity prevented it from being repaired.
The second is a steam turbine attached to a generator set. These are also expensive and very dependent on the economics of scale. Small steam turbines cost a lot more per KW of capacity than large ones.
The poor economics of making these two devices in a compact size is one of the biggest problem with the idea of compact nukes. They are one of the main reasons they didn’t decide to make compact nukes back in the 1950’s or 60’s when the American Nuclear business was at its peak, not because we lacked some magical insight or technology. It is because they made an otherwise un-economic power source even more un-economic.
Great to see a return to energy- scary to think its been 20 years!
If I may correct one point, it is not even close to true that wind turbines use more energy to make than they produce. The average windfarm produces 20X-25X more energy during its operational life than was used to construct and install its turbines, according to an evidence review published in the journal Renewable Energy, which included data from 119 turbines across 50 sites going back 30 years.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S096014810900055X
This is not to say everything’s fine and we can keep consuming at current levels; as you rightly point out, the future tends to be more complex and nuanced than any black or white ideology
I add my vote to Brian (50) and the practical steps.
JMG, I care a lot less about how much coal is left in Appalachia than about who owns it. It is also my view, shared by no one, I know, that American farmland and ground water, not to mention such forests as remain, are critical national resources and any kind of foreign, including partial, ownership of same should be prohibited.
I agree with Northwind Grandma for the fifth Wednesday post: “a discussion of blue-collar jobs/skilled trades, and apprenticeships thereof.” But, I would add specifically as it applies to surviving and thriving in a declining civilization (like now). Thanks!
@JMG
I’m always happy to see a return to Archdruid Report-style topics, especially since you have such a thoughtful and level-headed take on them, at least to my mind. Looking forward to seeing you revisit old predictions too, and I appreciate the willingness to do so. Maybe this is something you’ll go over in those posts, but would you say you underestimated the shale boom and its longevity in retrospect? Not that I’m arguing it makes peak oil irrelevant either way, just curious. Also, that “sources of global energy” graph is up there with the Mauna Loa curve as a monument to how badly the environment and climate movements have failed over the last 40 years or so.
While I was never a believer in an overnight apocalypse myself, I will admit the decline has been slower than I expected. I wasn’t around in the 1960s or ’70s, but sometimes I wonder what those people who (in my view correctly) understood limits to growth back then would have thought if they could see just how long business as usual has gone on for now. Sometimes I try to imagine what I’d say if I had to join the opposite camp and find the strongest possible argument for Progress, and I think this is what I’d settle on: how business as usual has turned out to be remarkably resilient, as wasteful and absurd as it often is. Even now, most people with a voice in mainstream society still seem fully committed to Progress and business as usual, and if anything threatens them it’s still treated as a temporary aberration (or we’re back in the Apocalypse binary again).
“most of what’s left is lignite, which gives much less energy when burnt—so much so that there are plenty of lignite deposits that aren’t worth mining, because you get less energy from them than it takes to get them out of the ground.”
This made me imagine unpleasant scenes of some kingdom in the deindustrial future using slave labor to dig up all that lignite, in order to use it for military purposes or other niches where fossil energy would translate into power (or luxury). Hopefully most of it isn’t accessible with hand tools…
@Maxine Rogers #19
“Going on holiday to the local lake and not flying to Bali.”
That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing the last six years, since I moved to this part of rural Norway. Other than the Glastonbury trip last year, anyway. Helps that we have a lot of lovely lakes, both small and large (indeed, one of them dominates the whole area and has a name that literally translates to “big lake”). More seriously, I’ve come to realize how much there is to see and do even in such a limited geographical area. I’m sure a person could spend a lifetime exploring within the borders of this municipality alone and not come close to seeing everything in those woods and hills. Maybe the deindustrial world won’t feel so stifling after all.
@JMG , I think the main driver of the West’s economic decline is not the current slow decrease of exported oil by producing countries.
I think it is because each year, there is a bigger share of it exported to Asia, ie China, South East Asia, India.
It is fair they get a bigger share yet the reality is that it makes Western economies be in rapid decline.
Any thought on that ?
I got into a conversation with a nine year old about what magic is, which eventually came round to the definition you use, a way of changing consciousness according to the will. Faced with this definition, the nine year old predictably returned a blank stare. But I was prepared for this! I unrolled an example which I had in mind for precisely this response:
— Let’s say you want a sandwich, but you don’t feel like making one. With magic you cannot wave a wand and say some words and have the sandwich appear, it doesn’t work like that. But what you can do instead is use some words and gestures to convince somebody that they want to make you a sandwich, and then you will have your sandwich!
And I was rather proud of myself until the nine year old casually responded:
— Oh, like going to a sandwich shop and buying one?
…and that got me thinking. Can money be said to be a tool of magic? Can it be said to be magical in its own right? Those with money certainly can and do use it to shape the consciousness of others. So that is my vote for a fifth Wednesday post topic: how are money and magic linked.
Migrant Worker
Dear JMG,
Thank you for this! And thank you more generally for your remarkable body of writings – I discovered your work this past January, and I’ve read about 20 of your books (on peak oil and magic especially) and several essays since then. They’ve been that wonderful combination of transformative and deeply affirming for me. I was shocked in retrospect how blinded I had been by the progress vs. apocalypse narrative, even though I consciously would’ve said that I don’t believe it’s that black and white (I also am shocked that I could say things like “you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet” and watch a movie like Minority Report and not say, “where the hell are they getting the energy to power all this?”).
I wanted to ask you for more details on the solar industry subsidies. When I look up solar industry subsidies, it’s like you say – it seems like they make up a significant portion (30% or more, I’ve read) of the money moving through solar companies. Yet my husband works for a company that does SCADA systems for big solar sites, and the owners of these sites are making unbelievable returns on their investments (they get very upset if there are ever interruptions to the computer systems.onsite because they lose so much money every minute it’s not working correctly). I’ve never understood how this squares with the larger reality of how much solar relies on subsidies. Is it just one more industry where some big companies are making tons of money from government payments? It just seems like even the smaller companies are making huge amounts off these sites. I would love your thoughts on this! (In retrospect, I maybe am asking about a much broader phenomenon, where government subsidies can make people super rich from an activity that really isn’t profitable.)
I also want to add that my husband is in a funny position of not “believing” in solar as a future-saver, while working full time in the industry. He handles that tension by putting as much of his income as we can into our little homestead! There are more than a few other engineers he works with who also spend a lot of their free time trying to learn how to grow food (he thinks engineers, at least a substantial subset of them, are more likely than most to not be dazzled by technology, maybe because they’re too close to the realities of it).
Thank you again for your writing, it really has been such a gift.
I agree on the long descent scenario except on one point: what is the potential of the Dollar hyper-inflating? Because if that occurs, we could easily step into the Rawles’ “Patriots” book, with a collapsing society and massive loss of life.
My opinion on the Iran war was that we need their oil to keep the petro-dollar propped up. We are hemorrhaging debt, it’s at $40 trillion now, the yearly interest expense has topped $1 trillion, and there is no sign of this slowing. Iran’s oil was to be collateral to keep kicking the financial can down the road.
But we lost, and it appears we’ll never get our hands on their guzzoline. And it certainly looks like we’re in a recession now, which will expand the debt even faster. So the question is: how much longer can we sputter along before there’s a massive break in the dollar and financial markets? We won’t be able to print our way out of it like in 2008, dropping interest rates to zero. The Fed Reserve is boxed in. In Hemingway’s words, hyper-inflation begins gradually, and then all at once. This is where the Mad Max scenario enters the picture.
Would we jack interest rates up to 20% like Volcker in 1980, and eat the ensuing depression? Very difficult to say.
Side point: Chris Martenson has done a number of videos lately describing how shale oil output is now contracting. Only the Permian Basin is remaining “steady”, neither increasing output or decreasing. All the other shale plays are falling. And conventional output has been shrinking for a long time, as JMG noted.
I’m glad we’re revisiting these ideas. Physics always wins. And when we contemplate that quite a bit of this limited resource is being blown up all around the Gulf, and that which isn’t blown up can’t readily be transported out of the Gulf region, the math just ain’t mathing.
We could cross-pollinate Northwind Grandma’s Fifth Wednesday proposal about jobs (comment #40) with BeardTree’s Fifth Wednesday proposal (comment #4) about technologies. For instance our host has often talked about astrology as a good solid post-industrial vocation. Kim Stanley Robinson, in one of his “Three Californias” books (I think it was the third one, “Pacific Edge,” his ambiguous utopia), made quite a lot out of the return of sailing ships as a commercially viable means of transportation. There’s some amount of hand-waving involved (it’s Kim Stanley Robinson after all) but the notion has sure stayed with me…perhaps partly because I read those books right around the time I first read The Long Descent.
All of which comes together in JMG’s reply to ChristianFW (comment #41):
“As for renewables, of course they have considerable potential. The problem is that nearly all renewable installations these days are intended to power the electric grid, which they do very poorly and very inefficiently. Using wind and water power directly as mechanical energy (e.g., in mills and factories), and using solar power as a source of moderate heat (e.g., household hot water and many industrial processes), are very efficient and can be the basis for an industrial society (cough, cough, 18th century Britain and New England before steam engines were perfected); it’s just that all the money’s going in the wrong direction. More on this as we proceed!”
…and also in viduraawakened’s comment #64. So my Fifth Wednesday vote is for something about all of that: the resurrection of denigrated and/or older technologies as vocational options during the long descent.
Dylan #44: You’ll find that readership right here….it’s just that there aren’t all that many of us! I’d read the hell out of that book.
When I was fifteen, I saw the same resource problems and invented a lifeboat fortress that could be carved into any convenient mesa in the Southwest. Fortunately for me, my mom taught the literature of science fiction and pointed me to Oath of Fealty by Niven & Pournelle as well as Arcosanti. Disappointed by my pre-failed plans for arcologies, I latched onto Kunstler’s Home from Nowhere and even pitched ideas like ped pockets, walkable neighborhoods, houses expanded from a small base unit and cohousing to builders and bankers. That went about as well as you’d expect in a slightly up economy. So – for the fifth Wednesday topic, might you say a few words about the rearrangement of living arrangements that might develop in a lower energy economy? (I’m betting there will be institutions like the YMCA in its original role.)
As an aside – I get the usual response to challenging the Monofuture when I bring this stuff up to the good people, but… when I ask the people who use tools, they say the doing isn’t the problem, it’s getting enough interest to get started.
“…curiously enough, supports the odd notion that LLMs are infested by evil spirits. Satan is the father of what?”
Hahaha… indeed!
That said, and as I put in the posts about the internet being a materialist’s analogue of an astral, but that the internet is a deeper dive into the material rather than ‘beyond’; sub realms are not necessarily where we might best choose to go.
So, I don’t know about being infested by evil spirits, but from an energetic potential, one gets to choose direction of spiral – evolve or devolve. So evil spirits works as a metaphor about being careful what one chooses.
Actively choosing to lie? It seems to be a long tradition currently experiencing a massive renaissance and no doubt deserves a patron. There’s probably quite a few to choose from.
Practically speaking, now seems like an especially good time to follow one’s Ideal.
I’ll second Angelica’s nomination of “the tangled emotional roots” of apocalyptic belief” at #58. This connects with the Zionist Christians (who have been brought up here before). The “Traditionalists” are not immune from apocalyptic belief either. They seem pretty committed to a linear view of history, implying apocalypse at some point. It would be an interesting topic, at any rate.
Regarding the Nantucket series mentioned at #16: I gave up about half way through the first novel. Once the basic concept, however fantastic, was grasped, all that was likely to follow seemed pretty predictable. Life’s too short to read long, predictable fiction.
Once again, all votes have been tabulated; thank you.
Dylan, I somehow managed not to know that. What an absurd plot gimmick. As for your Secret Key, I’d encourage you to give it a try — you might be surprised.
Tom, many thanks!
Nick, and it says quite a bit about the hellscape the modern world has become for so many people that such a prospect appeals as much as it does.
Sirustalcelion, it’s sensible that geopolitical predictions only go that far, since the aftermath of an imperial power’s retreat depends on too many contingent variables. Energy is more predictable, since it’s constrained by the laws of thermodynamics and the power law.
Cliff, I know. Blind faith in the myth of progress makes it impossible for many people to do basic subtraction.
GlassHammer, I think it’s more that the prosperity gospel and the meritocracy shuck are convenient excuses for selfish people to pretend that others don’t need their generosity.
Anon, not all the “Other” category is renewable.
Chronojourner, thanks for this. I’ve seen some of his work in the past but need to catch up on where he is now.
Justin, I know. Rhyd is quite correct.
Viduraawakened, that’s certainly one potential suite of future technologies. There will be many others. The future’s a very big place, and it’s full of possibilities that the mental monoculture of our time has never even dreamed of.
Greg, oh, there will certainly be islands of prosperity; there always are. They also always get overrun sooner or later, leaving glamorous legends to be embroidered by the bards of the dark ages to come.
Roldy, personal anecdotes are important to the people to whom they happen — but have you looked at the overall death toll per year from cancer?
Aurelien, all this is important, and indeed plays an important part in the slope of the Long Descent — but that slope is driven by the deeper and slower force of ongoing depletion. Nobody here’s talking about “apocalypse tomorrow” — my first book on peak oil wasn’t titled The Short Descent, you know! — but it’s because of the finite nature of fossil fuel reserves and the rising cost of exploiting them that the factors you’ve sketched out here are becoming increasingly problematic, and will get worse as things proceed.
Scotlyn, thanks for this. No doubt those deepwater wells off the Irish coast will be drilled in due time, and exhausted in due time as well.
Celadon, yep. The whole shuck and jive about how Progress means that it’s okay that we monopolize most of the planet’s wealth, because someday everyone will have the same things we do, comes crashing to the ground the moment you face the real future — and people who’ve built their identities around being the Good People™ can’t stand that.
Longsword, I’m glad to hear that. They’ve preserved the adaptations that allow for personal and cultural survival in hard times.
Paradoctor, not if you factor in the full manufacturing (including sourcing raw materials), maintenance, and disposal costs. If solar + batteries were cheaper than coal, then solar + batteries would produce a share of global primary energy comparable to coal, instead of being a niche market.
Clay, an excellent point!
Edington, thanks for this, and I’ll certainly review the evidence they provide. I’ll also check on who funded the study — perhaps you remember the study issued around 15 years ago, funded by the nuclear industry, that insisted that fission plants had a net energy of 45 or so to 1.
Mary, a lack of attention to scale is half of what got us into this mess, you know.
BorealBear, what I misunderstood regarding the shale boom — as I’ve discussed here several times already — was the extent to which politics trumps economics when it comes to energy resources. Shale fracking was never economically viable, but I jumped from there to the conclusion that the boom in shale investment was a speculative bubble that would soon pop. It wasn’t a speculative bubble; it was a deliberate choice by the US government and the big banks to prop up the fracking industry with limitless cheap credit to keep domestic oil production up, irrespective of economic issues. So, yes, it went on much longer than I expected, being finally constrained by geological rather than economic issues. As for attitudes in the 1970s — I wasn’t following the debates in the 1960s — it was divided then as now into an apocalyptic majority and a minority who recognized that decline is a slow process.
Tony, that’s also part of the picture. Remember that what defines our predicament is not an either/or but a both/and situation.
Migrant, money is nothing but magic. It only has value because people believe it has value — why else would anybody accept a few scraps of limp and greasy paper, or a few magnetic charges in a data center somewhere, in exchange for a sandwich?
Sama, the easiest way to make a big fortune these days is to find an industry that gets government subsidies. That’s the foundation of Elon Musk’s fortune, just to cite the obvious example; every one of the industries where he’s made money is one that depends on government contracts and subsidies. In the case of solar energy, there are several levels of subsidy — the direct subsidies paid to owners of PV plants, and the indirect subsidies that allow manufacturers of PV panels and associated hardware to produce these more cheaply, just for starters.
Wetdog, hyperinflation is a choice made by governments. The other choice, and the one for which the US government is clearly preparing itself, is a debt default. That’s the usual approach, and it’s typically successful — you might look into the 1998 Russian debt default, which marked the end of Russia’s post-Soviet depression. I expect the US to default on its foreign debt within a decade or so. That’s why it’s laying off employees, cutting unproductive departments, renegotiating agreements with other countries, reshoring industry, etc. — all things that will make the default less traumatic domestically. Mind you, it’ll wreck the entire globalization project and cause a cascade of unpredictable changes at home, but that’s a cost the US is clearly willing to pay.
BTW, the people who insist that hyperinflation inevitably leads to a Mad Max future never get around to asking the obvious question. Hyperinflation has happened now and again in modern history — Germany in the 1920s is the classic example, but there are others. Has that ever caused Mad Max conditions? Look it up sometime; you might be interested to discover that the answer is no.
Michelle, exactly. Hold on to the grab bar, here we go — wheeeee!
Math, so noted! I’ll keep this in mind as the votes tot up.
Rhydlyd, I had similar notions when I was fifteen, though they focused on the northwest Pacific coast.
Earthworm, true enough!
regarding the future of the internet: this has been the year that I made a concerted effort to cut my internet use. I think I’ve dropped it about 40% or so, kept up for the last six months. Results: a major drop in dry eye and corneal erosion symptoms and resultant improvements in quality of life. A lot more physical books read. More gardening than last year and better harvests (though that was a concurrent goal and not primarily due to lowering internet use), continued high amounts of drawing/painting/miniature and terrain building and playing wargames, more cooking from scratch, some increased fibro pain, especially in legs and lower back. It’s difficult to find things to replace internet time with without overdoing things and exhausting/hurting myself. Figuring out what I can and can’t do and adjusting accordingly is always a struggle, internet or less internet.
Overall: worth it. The internet these days is not as good as it was, and I don’t want to spend as much time on it as I was.
LLMs were trained on the internet, and people frequently lie about stuff and make up random stuff on the internet. Is it any surprise that LLMs would learn how to lie to people and make up random stuff?
For the Fifth Wednesday post, I vote for a discussion of the kinds of dangers that polytheists and occultists may face from Christians as the Long Descent gathers steam – and vice versa.
Regarding today’s post, I have a question: What, in your estimation, JMG, are the best currently available sources for honest and reasonably accurate calculations of EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) for the various energy technologies that are currently being used or proposed?
In particular, is it really true that wind and solar power have EROEIs of below 1, rather than in the low- to mid-single digits, as was often claimed during the heyday of the Peak Oil movement 20 years ago?
RE: Your Pacific Northwestern lifeboat daydreams.
Do tell!
viduraawakened,
As somebody who spent the last six years worried about the fate of mathematics and the sciences as Faustian European civilization declines and collapses around us, it would be a very good outcome for me if India and other non-European civilizations help preserve these achievements of Faustian European civilization beyond the collapse of Faustian European civilization.
I am glad you are revisiting the peak oil predicament. You are one of the only people addressing it as a real situation, not a moral failing, religion, or a snarl word. I’m looking forward to pushing my thought into different places. Many thanks.
I am voting for “the tangled emotional roots” of apocalyptic belief” that #58 Angelica posited, and #88 Phutatorius seconded. As a descendant of the fevered dream world of the Christian worldview, the doomer mindset was a true fit for me. Thankfully, I worked my way through THAT dead end. As an oppositional defiant fringe dweller, I adhere to the Marxian maxim “I would never join a club that would have me as a member.” Of course, Julius Henry Marx got some things wrong, but he was a human, after all.
Oh God. I saw that, had this idea, and now it’s too funny not to ask for. I’m sorry.
My vote for the fifth Wednesday post is for an in depth analysis of that wretched series. Not the actual content of the series or anything about its characters, but more like what forces made for that particular folly, its popularity, and the behaviour of its fandom. Special attention to that last one would being me particular joy. And: why the actual thing you mentioned, that the appearance of something on that show makes people think it could exist for real.
Irony: I am, not even kidding here, wearing a t-shirt of the wretched series today. I’m a sometime part of that same fandom. I will be wearing at least part of the pie I’m asking to be thrown. 😉
“That Wretched Series”. I feel like it should be called that here, like how another thing is “that Scottish play” in theatre.
One time I asked on social media if any of the wretched movies passed the Bechdel Test, and wow did I get scorched for that.
Also: I thought there was something we were supposed to do for the beetles. Some minor adjustment? No?
I guess it’s fair to say that the “provisional” apocalypse set actually don’t believe in it either. They can’t – if they did, it wouldn’t be distant enough to be their “provisional” thing. But they do need others to believe it, so they (the provisionals) appear suitably as the one day heroes. Or if not believe it, at least not dismiss it as fundamentally unserious. And then along comes one John Michael Greer with some unasked for comments about how the emperor needs to cover up and yeah, I can see how you get the scorching you report about that. I bet the pope wouldn’t like it if you proved heaven isn’t real too.
Hey, the answer to my question about the wretched series wouldn’t also be that general shape, would it?
I spent my navy days at a desk. Only went to sea twice, once for a day and the second time for a week aboard the USS Mount Whitney. It was very strange being one of 15 women with 1000 men. They ALL knew who we were and for years afterward in Norfolk, I have a stranger approach me in the PX (Post exchange) remembering me.
I for sure didn’t serve onboard a sub! However, I knew sailors who did, both in Hawaii and in Norfolk.
One, a good friend and the husband of a good friend, dragged himself through nuke school in Orlando. He said it was VERY hard. He had that T-shirt and currently, proudly wears the same slogan on his motorcycle vest. He’s got a Blue Nose certificate showing he’d been above the Arctic Circle. Date, latitude, and longitude are all classified.
Another sub guy moved from fast attacks to cruisers. He used to sleep on a hammock suspended over the missile tubes so he didn’t have to hot rack. Hot racking is when you share a bunk with another sailor who’s on a different shift than you. It’s because of a serious lack of space on a sub. No one likes it. Boomers have more space than fast attacks but they’re still very tight.
The problem with sleeping on a hammock suspended over the missile tubes is that — this was widely believed — that you’d never father a son again. You could father a girl, but not a boy. I don’t know if that’s true.
Sub guys are different from surface navy, just like brown shoe (aviators) are different from black shoes (surface navy officers). Helicopter aviators are not the same as plane aviators. Warrant officers are not the same as other officers. Despite their differences, they all agree that the Navy should beat Army.
My first duty station was at Cinc Pac Fleet (Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet) in Pearl Harbor. We had big screen TV to watch CNN round the clock (Jan1985 – March 1988). I learned that a brown shoe guy (aviator) will watch “Top Gun” dozens of times to reexperience the need for speed. A black shoe sub guy will subject the same pack of watch-standers to “Das Boot” in all its permutations dozens of times. Thank God the surface black shoe officer would watch better Navy flicks like “The Navy vs. the Night Monsters” and “Hellcats of the Navy!”
@Justin Patrick Moore #37
Funny!
But, yeah, I’m talking about a VERY different kind of boomer.
JMG, I do take your point about depletion, especially when one considers that at least half if not 3/4th of consumer spending in the USA is wasteful and unnecessary. I also do believe and assert that ownership matters as well, and I don’t see atention paid to that factor by anyone.
Rhydlyd (no. 86), Niven and Pournelle’s “Oath of Fealty” wasn’t so much a lifeboat fortress, as a giant shopping mall with built-in apartments, an unusually restrictive tenants’ agreement, and substantial political power. The premise was that some mogul built the whole thing after an LA earthquake. In real life we have gated communities, I guess (although the demand for giant malls didn’t materialize), and strange hybrid legal entities like Disneyland.
The dream of limitless fossil fuel supplies has not yet (quite) ended:
“A massive drilling project in Russia is attempting to prove a contentious Soviet-era hypothesis: that oil can form in Earth’s depths without any organic matter.
This month, geologists at Saint Petersburg Mining University will start to drill boreholes up to 8 kilometers deep in the Russian Arctic Komi region, university leadership and local government announced on 4 June. The initiative, located not far from the record-breaking Kola Superdeep Borehole drilled by the Soviet Union, is supposed to trial novel drilling technology and equipment built in Russia. But it will also seek evidence that major oil deposits can be created by geological processes alone—proving oil is therefore a renewable, “endless” resource.”
https://www.science.org/content/article/russia-s-plan-drill-superdeep-holes-arctic-revives-controversial-theory-endless-oil
https://ria.ru/20250716/neft-2029262214.html
Hey JMG
On the subject of the 5th Wednesday vote, I rather like Beardtree’s suggestion of ignored and “forbidden” technology.
But in regards to this post, that paragraph about how the narrative of the “Myth of Progress” requires someone to play the part of the “Doomer” who’s always wrong, which many people enthusiastically take up, got me thinking of the “games” of Transactional Analysis.
I recently borrowed a copy of “Games People Play” from my friend Russell, and I’m up to the “Thesaurus” section. I think it’s likely that the book will describe a “game” that fits the character of the Doomer, and possibly shed some light about its true nature.
Also, I have finally published my review of “The Sea and Summer” on my Substack. I wish I finished it earlier since I think it would have been very relevant to the previous “Musical Chairs” post.
https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/the-sea-and-summer-by-george-turner
“coal is already being used as fast as it can be mined. Converting it into oil can be done, but at a frightful cost in net energy”
My mother remembered coal-powered cars in Brazil where she grew up in the 30s and 40s. Thanks for a happy memory of that beloved lady.
Sirustalcelion 51
> demand destruction is mostly affecting schools and youth activities.
Gee, a terrific time for “youth” (aka teenagers) (12-19) to take advantage of those blue-collar apprenticeships I talk about.
Nothing bad about, right after graduating high school, one earns $100/hour. Here, at this time,— journeyman electricians make $250/hour.)
💨👨🏼🏭🛤️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@Mary Bennet (#77) wrote:
“my view, shared by no one,’ — shared by me, too. It’s a very important point!
Seems to me the DataCehters are currently occupying the Apocalypse de Jour slot. And every not-quite-actually apocapypse of the last couple decades is getting invoked as a possible result.
It’s all so tiresome.
I would like to vote for Ken V’s suggestion of sorting out natural magic from marketing drek. What is real and what is scam? How can we tell?
JMG,
Most people think that high oil prices just affect what they pay at the pump and perhaps a bit of cost for the things that they buy due to increased trucking costs. But it really effects the cost of almost everything. I believe that this is even worse in the case of hydrofracked oil and gas production. Since these methods of production are actually uneconomic when all costs are considered they have to be subsidized by cheap unlimited credit. But since they are so intensive of resources like water, sand, steel etc. this forced uneconomic activity creates a kind of stealth source of inflation. It is not an accident that the recent bought of inflation that has made the cost of living very difficult for the working class has happened during the period when hydrofracking has become the dominant source of petroleum production. This creates a double whammy with increasing oil prices combined with the pressure of other resources being consumed and diverted away form the consumer and regular industrial economy.
I’ll vote for Beardtree, #4. Technologies that work, but are neglected. Lew
Votes have again been tabulated; thank you.
Pygmycory, delighted to hear it!
Denizen, EROEI/net energy calculations are fiendishly difficult and results stray all over the map; there’s also a lot of room for fudging in either direction. This is why I like to use a proxy measure that’s harder to fake — profitability. If a resource can make serious money without government subsidies, as fossil fuels have often done, it’s safe to say that it has a high net energy. If it can’t — well, you can do the math yourself. I’m unsure of the net energy of big wind turbines and solar PV — that’s why, in the post, I noted that “some calculations” put the net energy of big wind turbines at less than 1 — but it’s certainly low.
Rhydlyd, nope. They were dumb ideas and I ditched them by the ripe old age of seventeen.
Cynthia, the difficulty there is that I never watched anything but the original series, and that was fifty years ago. Nor have I ever had any contact with the fandom. I simply don’t have the background (or the strong stomach) to do such a post. I hadn’t heard of the Bechdel Test before, btw; I note with some interest that every novel of mine with a female viewpoint character passes it easily. (The ones with male viewpoint characters don’t generally feature two women having a private conversation…)
Teresa, duly noted! The only other people I’ve met who used the term “boomers” for nuclear-missile subs were submariners.
Grimmelshausen, to my mind that’s a useful measure of just how desperate things are. There are excellent reasons why that won’t work, starting with the fact that heat rises as you go down, and not too far down you pass the point where oil breaks down under heat to become natural gas.
J.L.Mc12, excellent! Yes, I’m quite sure the Progress Game can be mapped out in TA terms, though I don’t happen to recall if that book does so.
Michelle, you’re welcome. Do you happen to know if they used steam engines?
BoysMom, granted. A technology can have nasty side effects and still not be apocalyptic.
Clay, exactly. The necessity to force interest rates down close to zero, in order to be able to afford all those stealth subsidies, also exacted significant economic damage, so that also belongs in the hidden-cost ledger.
Theresa @ 97 wrote: “The problem with sleeping on a hammock suspended over the missile tubes is that — this was widely believed — that you’d never father a son again. You could father a girl, but not a boy. I don’t know if that’s true.”
I don’t know if it’s true either, or if any actual studies have been performed. I worked on radar in the Air Force. There was a similar superstition about non-ionizing radiation from radar; that you’d get daughters, not sons. Supposedly, commercial and military pilots, who get exposed to lots of radar/microwave, have noticed a similar effect. I don’t know if it’s true. Who would want to fund a scientific study to find out? Who would publish it? Because if it were true, then exposure to cellphone radiation would also be suspect. (Where’s Patricia O. when you need her opinion?) Tinfoil hats? How about a tinfoil jockstrap?
Denizen and JMG,
One of the reasons that EROI calculations are so unreliable for things like wind and solar is that are based on estimates of operating life and maintenance costs for large wind and solar. For example when pitching to investors they often use a useful operating life for wind turbines of 25 years. This is incredibly important to the EROI calculation because most of the cost are in up front capital so the last few years of production are the ones that create all the extra energy over and above the energy needed to build the device. If that operating life comes up short, then it can turn a EROI of 1.5 in to 1.
They are finding that useful lives of wind turbines are much lower than 25 for several reasons. The worst is that on the big turbines the speeds at the outer end of the blade are so high that the leading edge is being eroded by dust striking the surface at high speeds. They are finding this difficult to fix as patches don’t work well and have to be applie by a working hanging from a rope strung down from the hub as it is too high for any kind of lift.
They can’t easily replace the blades as they are huge, expensive, have huge embedded energy and the roads needed to get in the giant cranes ( the largest in the world) are often removed after installation. So when the blades get too worn they often mothball the entire turbine at much shorter intervals of 10 or 15 years. That is why the estimates for EROI are changing of late.
JMG,
One looming aspect of the current Iran situation is that several nations, most notably the US and China, are pumping away at their strategic petroleum reserves to keep the oil supply up and prices down and thereby maintain some semblance of economic normalcy, despite the sudden loss of oil coming through the Strait of Hormuz. This artificially blunts price signals that would normally cause a corresponding ramp-down in usage, and we’re likely to see an oil supply shock whenever these SPRs do finally reach tank bottom.
Best estimate I’ve seen for the US’s SPR running out is late December, while for China that’s anyone’s guess. So far it seems that the US is betting that it can re-open the Strait before this happens, with a side-bet that its SPR will hold out at least through this November’s election day. Conversely, China seems to be betting that their SPR will hold out longer than the US’s, and then they can do as they please on the world stage.
Any way this turns out, we’ll all know soon enough! Personally, I’m stocking up on parts for my household bicycles and planning a fall garden.
In closing, thanks for today’s essay, and I am looking forward to future posts in this series.
I’ve noticed that prophets of doom who aren’t really profiteers of doom getting something in the here and now from their predictions often schedule doomsday for around when one would expect them to die naturally.
JMG: Oh gosh, I don’t expect you to actually make such a post! If nothing else, no one else is going to waste a vote on an absurdity like that. I was really just trying to provide a little amusement. I shall be happy to read about whatever the winning idea turns out to be.
Anyway, I think it’s always fair for you to say, “Nope, that idea’s not a candidate – pick something else or abstain.” For any reason or no reason. A soft delivery like that is nice though, thank you.
At first I was surprised that you hadn’t heard of the Bechdel test, thinking it was quite a well known thing, but then I realized, “durr, it’s about video” – why would I expect someone who eschews video to know about it?
“Grimmelshausen, to my mind that’s a useful measure of just how desperate things are. There are excellent reasons why that won’t work, starting with the fact that heat rises as you go down, and not too far down you pass the point where oil breaks down under heat to become natural gas.”
There’s also the problem that even if “abiotic oil” exists, if it replenishes at slow enough rates, it behaves like a finite resource and so is subject to the same constraints as conventional oil. If it takes a thousand years for the abiotic oil reserves to fill up again, that’s already too late for the survival of industrial civilization.
Thanks for this, and in advance for your plan to revisit where we are and where we’re going.
To my chagrin I did buy into an apocalyptic vision for a while, but fortunately I read someone — maybe it was you at the Archdruid Report? — that put the fallacy in a very, um, succinct way that helped talk me down. It was the historical score of apocalyptic predictions …
World: 114,274,878,920,399,241
Apocalypse: 0
Oh… umm… right. It’s not just about video. Silly me.
I even meant to say something about the books too, “it makes sense that male perspective stories don’t feature private conversations between two women – that perspective usually doesn’t include that in real life either.”
Instead I went into dummy mode and said the other thing. Me and my awkward are off to play guitar now.
So, a long road of attrition instead of an instant movie style catastrophe. That matches up well with what I noticed during the Reagan administration and the long decline since then. So, water mills and wind mills locally important for grinding grain, sawing wood and turning electric turbines but not sufficient to power everything we use now. Oil and natural gas slowly being replace by biofuels in areas where it makes sense economically but not everywhere. An almost desperate attempt to transition back to coal that fails because the lignite coal we still have is less useful than planting trees and burning wood. An emptying out of cities as homesteading becomes the growth sector of the future and a return to animal drawn vehicles makes cities more unsanitary than the country. A slowly increasing demand for adult size tricycles with enough space to carry your groceries in one trip, but you need to plan to make two trips a week instead of just one. Last week I went out to throw something in the recycle bin and saw three chickens in my front yard scratching in the mulch under my magnolia tree. I have no idea where they came from or where they went. So far as I know none of my neighbors are raising chickens.
Cynthia Christie 96
> that wretched series
No-one has said what the name of this talked-about series is. I can guess.
Star Treck? (STA)
If this is the show, Jethro and I were REALLY into the various series’ over forty-odd years. We never missed a show. We devotedly videotaped entire years’ worth along the way, then bought several DVD sets after each series ended. The episodes were so, umm, modern, edgy, and cool. Watching was one of the very few things we enjoyed together. STA was special. To this day, I feel fondly towards the various series’. I think DS9 was my favorite, although NextGen was close behind.
Now and then, I watch an episode. They feel dated. The story-lines are outlandish in the sense of non-sensical but I must admit the stories do hold up (their end of the bargain) as being wonderful fantasy entertainment. Most episodes are fun still. I also love the gorgeous sets; the producers put a lot of effort into the sets.
From the 1970s (‘original’ re-runs) through the 2010s, Jethro thought many of the things in STA would come true. Even the transporter was not out of the question. STA was an imagined world he found comforting the whole time. But now over 60, he views STA soberly, and with a Gomer Pyle goofy-face, wistfully says, “Nah, not gonna happen.” Then “drat.”
💨🚀💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I found an old file a coal to liquids. I can’t find it online anymore, It’s a government paper so it should be somewhere.
The short version is;
In 2004 dollars a 100,000 barrel per day CTL plant would cost $7 billion to build and $350 million a year to operate. The distillates output would be about $45 a barrel. (again, 2004 dollars).
The paper is DOE/NETL-2006/1237
Economic Impacts of U.S. Liquid Fuel Mitigation Options
The Augmented Idiot says the US uses just less than 3 million barrels of diesel per day, so 30 plants should do it .😊
JMG (no. 43) ” I’m waiting for the first fringe thinker to combine UFOs with the flat earth theory and proclaim that there’s an infinite number of worlds like ours, all on a vast flat surface extending forever in all directions…”
Flat Earthers nowadays mostly think that beyond the ice wall (i.e. Antarctica, conceived as the rim of the flat earth), there is a plunge into empty space. However, a minority believe that additional, otherwise unknown continents lie beyond the ice wall. (This raises problems relating to solar movement, but any flat earth model has trouble in that area.) This second group would not speak of different “planets” sharing the same plane, so much as one very big (perhaps infinite) earth surface. UFOs are more associated with Hollow Earthers, who tend to view them either as the enlightened emissaries of an advanced civilization, or as Nazis plotting mischief.
I should add that Flat Earthers are often confused about what other planets are. Some hold that they are illusory holograms.
Note from a submariner, nuclear qualified;
To sleep over the missile tubes would require that you were outside the pressure hull. The missiles depart through hatches on top of the tubes. You could sleep along side the missile tubes and still be inside the pressure hull. I don’t think they did that though, but I was on an attack boat. Yes, the ballistic missile boats are called boomers. The surface fleet is skimmers or targets.
That story that the radiation would cause a gender shift to favor girls is an old one and legend has it that was one reason the original 15 rem/yr allowable dose was cut to 5, and the Navy later cut it to 500 millirem. There is another legend that Mommy has more to do with gender selection as the pH of her vagina affects male sperm more than female.
However this effect is not seen in cattle.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6755399/
Yes, Das Boot is great, Gray Lady Down was terrible, never could watch the whole thing.
JMG,
Do you think it’s possible that the United States could have responded to peak oil and climate change in a proactive way that provided posterity with a more sustainable future with a less ragged path down the Great Descent, or do you think it’s inevitable that we responded the way we have?
I keep debating that, as our democracy doesn’t seem suitable to elect leaders who will make their voter base suffer short-term sacrifices to put off a far-off crisis.
JMG my vote this month for the fifth Wednesday essay is a magical geography of the Unites States of America. I think it is a long shot but here’s hoping.
I found another old essay by our host here:
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/is-history-on-anyones-side.html
with this important quote inside of it:
“A more specific problem, though, is that if peak oil is on anyone’s side, it’s not likely to be that of the liberal causes for which Astyk hopes to recruit it. Most of the great achievements of the liberal tradition have taken place in times of economic expansion – consider the abolition of the slave trade in the prosperous early Victorian era, for example, or the civil rights movement in America in the boomtime 1950s. Times of economic contraction, by contrast, tend to foster reactionary politics – consider the spread of totalitarian regimes across Europe in the decade that followed the stock market crash of 1929. Those tendencies are no more absolute than anything else in history, but they do exist.”
Food for thought for anybody wondering why the liberal establishment in the United States might be doomed and likely to be replaced with nastier ideologies, like what’s being promoted on the extremes of the left and the right today.
@BorealBear #79… if you look at the standard model forecast from the 1970s Limits to Growth book, we’re pretty much right on track.
Here is an aural model for how things can be constantly getting better while at the same time they are constantly getting worse: https://soundclick.com/song/12982295
For fifth Wednesday; I’m going to vote for “the tangled emotional roots” of apocalyptic belief”
The Rapture is Near crowd seems to be fired up again on the religious side, and the climate doomers too.
“An estimated less than one percent of the planet was hotter than France’s hottest place.” from one breathless report.
Back on energy ”
“Between May 1, 2025, and April 30, 2026, the installed capacity of utility-scale solar increased by 27,572.3 MW, while small-scale solar and wind grew by 6,492.2 MW and 5,976.4 MW, respectively. The combined capacity of all renewable energy sources, including hydropower, biomass, and geothermal, expanded by 39,884.2 MW.
EIA reported that, in April, utility-scale solar capacity surpassed wind capacity for the first time (160,208.1 MW vs. 160,100.6 MW).
Further, utility-scale battery energy storage capacity increased by 17,703.5 MW, or 58.1%. Nuclear added just 18.4 MW.
Notice they keep going by nameplate capacity. 🙄
https://electrek.co/2026/06/26/eia-renewables-30-percent-us-electricity-generation/
Hi John Michael,
Yes, the Limits to Growth scholars had a similar ideal to that of the Peak Oil folks. Show the data, make some solid predictions and everything will change. The silly sausages… I read the first edition paperback version of the 1972 classic (which is as old as I am), and wondered at the scholarly tone of the work. In 2005, I came across the idea of Peak Oil, read an interesting book on the subject by Paul Roberts, titled The End of Oil, and his arguments sounded pretty spot on, a long ragged decline. I can’t recall whether the unconventional oil side of the story was addressed, but does it matter? The outcome is more or less the same, but over a longer time period.
I didn’t need to be convinced any further, must be something wrong with my wiring! 🙂 And you alerted me to the apocalypse belief side of the story, and that made sense too. Yeah.
I love to recount this story, but truly the strangest thing anyone has ever said to me on the interweb over the long years, was when I casually mentioned that on one day over winter, the solar power system here recorded only 15 minutes of Peak Sunlight, for the entire day. His claim was that my system was at fault because he had this model which told him that it should have recorded 2 hours at this southerly latitude. Staggering belief. And wrong, the technology doesn’t work that way.
It’s rained here for 4 days straight now, and it was already wet. I’ve read serious people in other countries talking up drought fear in this country (which they may never have set foot on) about this super El Nino business, and last I checked, there is more water in the outback than probably at any point in the past 50 years. Sure, summer may be crazy hot, but right now, things are at the other extreme end. Where I am, not much rain has its origins in the Pacific, and the world is a very dynamic place.
Oh! Happy 21st blogging birthday! 🙂
Cheers
Chris
I would like to vote for the Fifth Wednesday topic that BeardTree proposed: a discussion of technologies that work, but are ignored or denigrated because their results can’t be explained by mainstream “science”. Homeopathy, is an example.
I will vote for Robert Graves for the fifth Wednseday topic. Thanks for bringing it up again, Justin Patrick Moore.
Dear JMG,
I always love it when the old ADR theme comes back, as I think that is why most of us started reading you. Incidentally, I was sitting down to start writing an article entitled “The Conversation New Zealand Will Not Have” for a semi-popular mainstream news site here, then this post came up. The sense of decline is everywhere here, as with most of the western world, but for some reason, thanks to the ADR, my family and I take it in our stride, just trying to be ahead of the consequences of decline as much as we can. That was great life advice, I won’t claim to be an expert, but so far, I have avoided some of the pitfalls (mostly psychological actually) that have got friends and family. But the peak oil mantra should be the same as the magical one – to will, to dare, to know, and to STFU in respect of oil…
More interestingly, I did recently run some numbers on the EROEI of wind and solar. They do break even, more than break even on their construction costs. The challenge comes in their maintenance costs and also grid support costs. No EROEI factors this in. The idling coal power plants in China are a classic, they have to idle them for nights, and bad weather when the solar PV won’t exactly do much. This is despite a fair bit of hydro in their grid. The melting Himalayas won’t help that hydro however. It’s not exactly Lake Powell, but I can see similar there in the future, but I at least respect the Chinese in that they’ll objectively tackle it.
In NZ, most of the time the grid support cost for wind and PV is paid for by hydro, given 60-70% hydro dominance in the grid. But all of that falls away when there is no water, and then its back to coal or gas. That doesn’t happen in NZ very often, but when it does, it’s a big deal. We have 3-4 months storage in the big hydro lakes, PV and wind might buy a month or two on the edges of that, but that’s it, tops.
There is also the depreciation and replacement cost. I realised that the world’s tax codes actually set out this EROEI issue in great detail, but I’m not aware of anyone combining them.
So what I think is happening is subtle – the renewables (apart from hydro which usually wins and keeps on winning), do break even on construction costs, but depending on the grid they are plugged into, they start to lose again.
Traditional EROEI can’t handle this, as its a scalar, not a vector over a manifold surface representing the grid etc. That’s a direction I’d love to see that field go in, as it might help the people talking past each other at present, and the very real national differences in energy systems.
Some believe there is a price of oil where producers aren’t getting enough to produce, and the cost is too high to allow industrial civilization to continue. That price is around $70 a barrel.
If that’s true, then we could face an accelerated decline instead of a gradual slope.
Re: the Bechdel test
It occurs to me that there’s an amusing way to pass the test on a technicality: have two women walk by the viewpoint character, who happens to overhear them complaining about how some unnamed movie or book didn’t pass the Bechdel test.
Bam. No matter what else happens in the story, it passes!
Once again, all votes have been tabulated. Thank you!
Clay, that’s certainly one of the many challenges; the gap between nameplate capacity and actual output during life span is another. I hadn’t read of the issue with dust abrasion, but it doesn’t surprise me in the least — diseconomies of scale are much more common than our usual habits of thought allow for.
Dr. Coyote, well, oil currently seems to be moving through the Strait, so we’ll see if rock bottom is actually reached.
Justin, very true!
Cynthia, put it down to my autism, but I take such suggestions seriously — and Star Dreck has had such a weirdly pervasive influence on attitudes toward the future that if I did have the background, I’d have considered it. As for the Bechdel test, I find it fascinating that movies fail it. How simpleminded screenwriters must be!
Anon, yes, there’s also that!
Laughingsong, ha! That wasn’t something I came up with, and it’s very, very good.
Moonwolf8, that’s how every civilization ends, unless it’s overwhelmed by invaders with an immense technological advantage — the end of the Aztec and Inca civilizations are the odd ones out here. Barring that, it’s the long slow unraveling.
Siliconguy, inflation between 1974 and 2026, according to a handy website I just visited, has been 601.42%, so that means coal-to-liquids using that method today would break even very nicely once oil reaches $270.64 a barrel. Where can I invest in such a sure thing? 😉
Ambrose, oh, I know. It’s just such a delectable stupidity.
Dennis, I think it could have been done. We spent most of the 1970s bracing ourselves for it, only to chuck the whole thing once Reagan took office; if the politics of the late 1970s had gone differently, things might have worked out. They didn’t, and it was probably a long shot at best, but as I pointed out in a sequence of posts a few years back —
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/alternatives-to-nihilism-part-one-dog.html
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/alternatives-to-nihilism-part-two-lead.html
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/alternatives-to-nihilism-part-three.html
— the sullen, jeering, and defensive nihilism of post 1970s America is the kind of thing you’d expect to see from a nation that knew it could have taken a better path, crumpled before the challenge, and took the easy way out instead.
Anon, a fine old 2007 post of mine! Here again, I think my viewpoint has proven itself.
Siliconguy, of course they go by nameplate capacity. Anything else would make it impossible to ignore the gap between fantasy and reality.
Chris, if there wasn’t a tolerably large ocean between you, I’d encourage you and Siliconguy to tip back a couple of beers together someday. We were just talking about the difference between nameplate capacity and how much power actually comes out of a solar or wind installation. As for the very wet drought you’re having, that’s yet another example of the way the real issues of climate change are being obscured by rhetoric founded on dubious models.
Peter, and true EROEI has to include maintenance as well as dismantling costs. Leave those out and you’re in La-La Land.
Bob, yep. I remember well when that number was supposed to be around $35 a barrel. The problem with all such calculations is that they try to force a sudden cutoff in a situation that’s actually a continuous slope; at $35 a barrel, certain things stop being viable and have to be replaced by other, less pleasant things; the same is true at $70 a barrel, and at every other price point.
Slithy, ha! Yeah, that would work.
PS to my last comment: I forgot that the characters have to be named, but that’s easy enough: just have them say each others names casually as they talk.
“As for the very wet drought you’re having, that’s yet another example of the way the real issues of climate change are being obscured by rhetoric founded on dubious models.”
Isn’t the heavy rainfall in Australia a consequence of the Polar cells disappearing and the Hadley cells moving southward into Australia?
“Bob, yep. I remember well when that number was supposed to be around $35 a barrel. The problem with all such calculations is that they try to force a sudden cutoff in a situation that’s actually a continuous slope; at $35 a barrel, certain things stop being viable and have to be replaced by other, less pleasant things; the same is true at $70 a barrel, and at every other price point.”
There’s also inflation which will also increase that number over time. If the United States ever suffers from hyperinflation in the near future for example, we might be seeing $5 billion a barrow while oil is still being pumped out of the ground.
Though this is my first comment here (I’ve made a few on Dreamwidth before), I’d like to cast a vote for the topic of blue-collar jobs for youngsters. I’m interested in this subject as what one might call a failure in the area of career, making just over minimum wage after graduating with a computer science degree a few years ago.
Dear JMG,
Thanks for another timely Wednesday essay. Glad you to see you revisiting this topic.
For an essay topic my vote would go to whatever you might have to say about grace.
Shortly after I learned about Peak Oil, I joined the apocalyptic conga-line and identified with neo-primitivism (though I at least had the clarity of mind think of myself more a “primitivist sympathizer” because I had no actual primitive survival skills). I grew out of it just like I grew out of my college-campus radical phase, only this more recent phase was outgrown rather more quickly because the parallels between neo-primitivist advocates online and campus radicals became impossible to ignore. I really have to wonder how many people who identified with neo-primitivism in the two-thousand aughts simply outgrew it a long time ago. Probably the vast majority. I really have to think the only people still taking it seriously are the die-hards who started seriously learning primitive survival skills in a big way in order to thrive in the new “paradise” they imagine is headed our way.
Northwind: Yes, we’re talking about Star Trek. The not naming it was a source of amusement for me, since I saw JMG’s reply to someone where he referred to it only as “that wretched series”, and I found it funny that in that context it must be that show, which it indeed turned out to be.
I saw Wrath of Khan in theatre in 1982 at age 11, and I got this huge fixation on that series of movies. There was something about the look and feel of the space shots, the ships, the interiors, and the uniforms, and in combination with the whole naval presentation, I thought the whole thing was just the bees knees. I saw the original series in reruns of course, and since it was the same guys I liked that too, but not as much.
When I was an older teen and a few years into my adulthood, I took it as a given that something like the technology protrayed on the show would be a thing, and in a lot less time than the three hundred years suggested too. That fell away very gradually over a period of years without leaving much of an impression on me as to how that happened, or even when. In 1992 I definitely still believed. In 2012 I did not.
I liked some 90s Trek and I would also say my favourite series of those was DS9. My favourite individual episode from that era, however, is from TNG, where they had David Ogden Stiers on, and his character was from a race of people who schedule their death for a certain birthday, and he starts dating Lwaxana even though his day is coming right up. Real tearjerker it was, and outstanding acting by Stiers and Majel Barrett. Terrible science, though. Stars don’t change noticably in 60 years unless that change is a nova.
JMG: It might actually be down to my weirdness that I thought that was funny. I can imagine another person not finding it funny enough to realize it was a joke.
No argument about what failing the Bechdel test means. 😉
The frustrating thing about arguing nuclear is that believers have some impressive-looking numbers on their side, and it takes a fair amount of nuance to point out what’s wrong with them, much more than I or most nuclear skeptics have.
Moreover, I’m willing to allow that nuclear power really might be able to take up most of the slack from fossil fuels in terms of raw megawatt-hours needed to keep industrial civilization going — but “most” is not “all” and anything less than “all” means decline.
A big challenge of course is that fossil fuels excel at moving small vehicles around, while nuclear excels at generating electricity. And as much as Tesla owners will want to argue, those are very different tasks, and the way we currently square that circle (large arrays of batteries) is its own massive sustainability challenge.
Please cast my vote for the fifth Wednesday topic of tech that is ignored dispite its succuss.
Hey JMG,
No vote for me for 5th Wednesday, as it’s a no-lose choice. Very complex topics being suggested. Whatever comes up will be interesting.
However, some questions I hope are addressed over the “return to peak oil” posts would be:
– if no adults are on the planet to help with mitigation, what effects stem from that?
– is the abundant wealth from fossil fuels and spare time to waste the root cause of so much modern insane “thinking”, is it more propaganda based, or a combination of both?
– why are so many people in modern culture today satisfied with living a lie, aka cognitive dissonance?
– will the ghost of FDR’s “sharing of the wealth” come into play soon in the U.S.? This would reverse the recent trickle up economics that’s tough on the bottom 70-80%.
– which approach of governing (local or national) will dominate in the next couple of decades? Personally, I’d love for state and national government to get back out of my life.
– will the shutdown of oil production have long term negative effects on the wells in the Middle East? I have never heard of this prior to the Hormuz experiment. As a side note, I get an oil check every month from wells drilled on my grandparent’s farm in North Dakota back in the early 1970s, shared across 45 or so grandkids. This month’s check was $54. I am a baron, not unlike Mr. Getty.
Thanks!
–
I would like to cast my 5th wednesday vote for the topic of the magical aspects of money.
Thank you.
I think one of the issues I had with coming to terms with so-called-renewable’s inability to replace fossil fuels when I first hear about that reality is that dollars are abstract. What’s the concern if we have to subsidize an energy technology? Dollars are infinite.
I realized that, just like pre-1971 when dollars were connected to gold and 1933 when dollars could be swapped for gold, there’s a reason we call it the petrodollar. Instead of a dollar being worth some amount of bullion, it’s now worth some amount of oil and therefore energy. So a technology that requires a financial subsidy also requires an energy subsidy and is therefore a net energy consumer.
Ethanol is the clearest case as government subsidization is the only thing keeping it afloat and is energetically very negative. Nuclear has been made more obscure as so much of the government money gets dumped in at the beginning but from what I understand there is still some financial involvement in day-to-day costs as well. Hydro is the only one that I have other thoughts about. Its ROI is probably in the century timeframe, but I think it exists. Unfortunately, only certain geographies are blessed with the required topography to make it happen so it will only ever be a niche option.
I think this is the easiest explanation for peak oil as well. Eventually, one petrodollar will exceed the value of one unit of energy. I know our accounting of how a much a dollar is worth is very woolly but when the inherent energy of a dollar is worth less than the energy it could purchase, that energy will not get purchased. It will stay in the ground.
Just some thoughts.
“No doubt those deepwater wells off the Irish coast will be drilled in due time, and exhausted in due time as well.”
I have no doubt on that point, all of my doubts are in the direction of whether the quantity of benefit that might accrue to ordinary Irish people from that exercise will be most likely to fall into the “some”, “a wee bit”, or “none at all” category.
Geopolitics being what they are. 😉
Speaking of apocalyptic thinking, I have been curious as to why the fact that most countries’ birth rates are now below replacement has been attracting so much concern.
Given how maintaining living standards with the limited carrying capacity of the Earth seems very much to be unsustainable, I don’t understand the “extinction” hysteria that surrounds how many describe certain countries number of children. The population of the Earth has been steadily growing since the Industrial Revolution. It is believed that before the year 1804, the human population never exceeded one billion. When a certain country’s population drops below pre-industrial levels, then I might worry about “extinction”.
In the meantime, I think of a line by British philosopher John Gray in his 2003 novel “Straw Dogs”:
“The human population growth that has taken place over the past few hundred years resembles nothing so much as the spikes that occur in the numbers of rabbits, house mice and plague rats. Like them, it can only be short-lived”
One intellectual I’ve enjoyed following over the years is Eric Weinstein. One of my professors once said that geniuses are hard to understand because the brain of a genius works differently and has a different way of communicating. I’ve found this with Weinstein. Sometimes he’s incredibly enlightening and gives brilliant analyses. Other times his views take some hard thinking. Other times I feel my brain ain’t big enough to grasp his ideas. But then he says that the only hope for humanity is to colonize other planets, and I start to think maybe he’s an idiot disguised as a genius and he’s just taken me for a ride all these years. I still enjoy hearing him interviewed though. Do you know of him and have any thoughts?
“Free energy” is (in a way) like “free markets” – easy to imagine, hard to manifest, given material limits to our incarnated reality.
New Thought style affirmations notwithstanding.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/us-home-battery-installations-hit-record-high-in-early-2026/
The fine article has a unit problem, kilowatt and kilowatt-hours are different things. It’s still interesting though.
Slithy T. # 56:
“or because the dirty hippies are deranged and also somehow have immense influence in the halls of power (but only with regards to nuclear, apparently).”
It seems this usual “reasoning”(or maybe rationatization of their love to nuclear power), is often preferred by pro-nuke supporters, though indeed it’s counterfactual: dirty hippies (a.k.a. ecologists) have a small influence over high spheres…It’s an embarrasing reality to understand nuke supporters are less reasonable/rational than they think about themselves.
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Aurelien # 68:
“In our splendid, neoliberal just-in-time economy, we rely on prompt delivery of everything, and this includes direct petroleum products as well as derivatives like sulphuric acid, without which much of world industry shuts down.”
Yeah, according our usual “idiots savants” with a degree in (neoliberal) Economy, just-in-time system is perfect, because companies can save some money avoiding to have bigcommodities and products warehouses. What could be wrong with this “genial” idea?(An “unlikely war in ME, as first “absurd” hypothesis).
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Scotlyn # 70:
“if the price of oil drops too low, exploration stops. If it rises too high, the economy crashes.”
Congratulations! You’ve summarized my intuitive ideas about current and future price oil dilemma, better than I thought about them. It’s a dirty and (opportunely?) unknown truth for near everybody in the world, even within educated people with a universitarian degree…
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Longsword # 73:
“Old houses renovation. Some are 200years old from comments. Thick walls. Secure bars on windows, heavy doors.”
It’s not exactly the same as what I’ve seen here in small towns, but it rhymes with the few areas which survived awful housing bubbles frenzy during the last 100 years. At least in the North of Spain, some reasonable and smart countryside people has saved old houses inherited from their ancestors, and they’ve updated them without defacing too many of those old houses. Here you can see thick walls made from bricks and adobe in quite small villages. Only in the mountains they prefer stone walls (you can guess evidently why). Secure bars in windows and thick doors are usual to be seen: the richest was/is the family who lived/live in these houses, the thickest are bars and doors…Some old houses have survived as rural tourism hostels.
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JMG # 89:
“money is nothing but magic. It only has value because people believe it has value”
Yes, and modern countries people have believed in their national currency because there was a government to tell them that money had value.
My grandpa told me that, during our last civil war, some rich people (or not so rich) who were living in the Republican side, saved a lot of money in the strangest places, to recover it when the war ended. However, this “genial” idea didn’t take into consideration that the 2nd spanish Republic would lose, and the far right rebels won. When Franco defeated finally the leftist side, Republican money value was 0. So those “treasures” became mere paper without any value.
By the way, if paper and metal money is a fiction, and usual currencies in the digital world are even more ficticious, what do you think about crypto-money?(Ahem)
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(To be continued)
Whatever happened to the Situationism series?
I vote for the functioning but out-competed technologies too.
—David P.
John, I also wanted to say thank you for the recent Solar Return chart… I thought the bit about Mercury, Uranus and Neptune in the Foundation Chart and how they relate to freedom of speech very interesting…
“…points to the role that freedom of speech and the endless public squabbling that results from it has always played as a pressure-release valve heading off more serious conflicts. The sextile with Neptune hints that the nonstop political bickering provides a smoke screen under which deeper changes work out quietly.”
A lot to contemplate there and stuff going on in that unconscious and deep places of the mind and spirit.
Grimmelshausen # 101:
“A massive drilling project in Russia is attempting to prove a contentious Soviet-era hypothesis: that oil can form in Earth’s depths without any organic matter.”
Oh, a good cornucopian attempt: the old counterfactic abiotic hypothesis about oil origin never dies…It’s a source of wry amusement for me to have reading again and again this Soviet fake science theory, to support abiotic oil…even by far right conspiracy theories nutties, since the “old good days” of the peak oil “community”.
In real world, depletion goes on and on…Depleted oilfields never “resurrect” again. Russia also will end exhausting its oil and gas reserves, like the OPEC countries alike.
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Dr. Coyote # 112:
“several nations, most notably the US and China, are pumping away at their strategic petroleum reserves to keep the oil supply up and prices down and thereby maintain some semblance of economic normalcy, despite the sudden loss of oil coming through the Strait of Hormuz.”
OK, you’ve written a good reminder of our likely weak economics and oil “happiness”, now that a “peace” treaty has been signed by USA and Iran, but I’d like to complete your smart view, remembering you the EU is also playing with its oil strategic reserves to pretend everything is OK now…I bet EU strategic oil reserves won’t be exhausted before September nor the beginning of fall, but who knows?
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Anonymous # 115:
“There’s also the problem that even if “abiotic oil” exists, if it replenishes at slow enough rates, it behaves like a finite resource and so is subject to the same constraints as conventional oil.”
Well, abiotic oil fake science supporters have a solution for this little problem: they usually like to shout in front of peak oilers that oil fields are replenishing fastly enough to keep using them forever…(?) Which it’s funny and sadly even more counter-factual than slow-replenishing oil fields idea, which contadicts their biased view.
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JMG # 135:
“Dr. Coyote, well, oil currently seems to be moving through the Strait, so we’ll see if rock bottom is actually reached.”
According my news sources, you’re right by now…but I also think current “peace treaty” in ME seems shaky, so I wouldn’t discard easily a likely returning to a hotter war situation soon or later (Israeli interest to destroy Iran theocracy or at least to weaken it more isn’t a joke). We’ll see…
My vote for the 5th Wednesday is BeardTree’s suggestion of technologies that work but are ignored or denigrated. I’m not sure if prayer is a technology but perhaps it can be added to the list.
Ever since reading Small is Beautiful in the 70s I have been a believer in appropriate technology as proposed by EF Schumacher. But mass production, distribution, and marketing are the clear winners these days. Maybe on the downslope small-scale appropriate technology will make a comeback.
Don’t write off coal to liquid plants just yet. South Africa has been producing liquid fuel from CTL plants since 1955. It has been successful enough to justify massive expansion, which is why we now have Sasols 1, 2, and 3.
Financial success is not guaranteed, but if the oil price is high, the coal feedstock of good quality, and imported natural gas not too expensive (South Africa has no indigenous sources of natural gas), Sasol can turn a nice profit. (Note that Sasol produces specialty chemicals as well as liquid fuels.)
Robert Matheisen @ 105. Thank you.
Hate to say I told you so, rude, I know, but I found this in the local news feed this morning:
Tucker Carlson publicly declared he is leaving the Republican Party and claims he is building a new political party. His primary grievance is what he describes as the GOP’s prioritization of foreign interests — specifically Israel — over American citizens. As of mid-2026, no formal party structure has been announced, and political analysts remain skeptical about whether the effort will move beyond rhetoric.
No formal party structure etc. means a. he is waiting to see what kind of backing and attention he can attract, and b., the guy ain’t dumb. Formal party structure can make you vulnerable to entryism and other kinds of manipulation. That was the mistake made by I think it was called the Reform Party back in the 90s.
@Silicon Guy,
I believe the confusion about sleeping above nuclear missiles on a sub ( impossible as you pointed out) is created by the common image in movies and perhaps reality of Sailors sleeping above torpedos in hammocks. This is not a reproduction issue, as in the US Navy, Torpedos are almost never equipped with nuclear war heads ( who knows about secret experiments). To the uninformed, these torpedos might look like missiles stacked up and ready to be loaded in to launch tubes ( which is not how it works as all missiles are preloaded at port) . But it shows you how a little information gleaned from entertainment media can be a dangerous thing.
JMG and @Dennis makes me wonder what the USA – and the world – would look like had Americans made that other choice.
“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!'”
That said, it must be noted that same choice was available for several other nations. None took it. China in particular went all in regarding industrialization.
Another blog post from our host:
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/culture-death.html
with this paragraph that’s worth reflecting on, since it’s been almost 20 years since that blog post was published:
“The impact of these dilemmas on our collective imagination of identity is likely to be drastic as the manufactured culture of the present comes apart. We are already seeing people in contemporary American society turn to almost any resource you care to imagine in the search for some anchor of group identity less transient than the whims of marketers; religion has often filled its time-honored role in this regard, but so have racial fantasies, sexual habits, apocalyptic social theories, and much more. Nor is it hard to find Americans who are trying to redefine themselves as members of some other culture, past, present, or imaginary – speakers of Klingon or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish languages, for example, outnumber speakers of quite a few real languages. This is still a fringe phenomenon, though much less so than it was twenty years ago; twenty years from now, as the deindustrial age opens around us, they may impact the social mainstream in ways impossible to predict in detail today.”
About renewables: the only renewable that can replace nuclear/oil/gas/coal as a main source of electricity is hydroelectric. But you can’t make the obscene amounts of concrete and steel it requires, not move the rocks and earth, with it. Granted you could use slaves to do the earthwork but you still need to smelt the metal and cook the concrete and cement. So even though hydroelectric can generate electricity for decades (see Hoover in the US or Itaipu in South America) it needs A LOT of cheap oil to be kickstarted. So in the far side of the oil curve it will be much harder to build more dams. Also all the best spots are already in use, and most of the marginal ones too. Finally hydro is incredibly vulnerable to climate change: droughts can force shutdowns. So even the best renewable is unable to keep 20th century industrial society long term.
About nuclear: i fear that, in despair, they will relax too much on the safety side. You can have cheap and powerful. The RMBKs from Soviet Union proved that. But safety becomes a secondary concern. The second way nuclear may become a problem is in space industry. In theory you can use nuclear detonations as some kind of rudimentary atomic rocket. The number, on paper, look good, it would be possible to build space treasure galleons and somewhat solve the lifting problem. Once more, on paper. They may argue that we can all get our uranium, potassium, phosphorus and rare earths from the Moon if we just accept daily atmospheric nuclear detonations and radioactive space debris falling from low orbit. And some countries may be actually desperate enough to do that bargain, like China and India, becoming superpowers in the beginning of the age of decay.
About AI: my polemic theory is that some jews are despairing that their Messiah is not coming on cue and they decided to build their own messiah of copper and cobalt. A lot of AI thinkers are jews, most AI companies are Jewish. Just look how they talk about the coming AGI/ASI, like some deliverer that will either save mankind or destroy it, defying physics by solving fusion through its sheer thinking power, cure cancer and unlock the secrets of immortality… this isn’t rational. This is religious, milleniarist thinking. So its impossible to point that there are reasons that the substrate for intelligence chosen by nature is fleshy brains and not electronic circuitry, like the fact that most of our materials are easy to find and can be easily manipulated using enzymes, small electrical charges, in a saltwater solution.
It’s crazy that we not only abandoned the path after Reagan took over, but made the situation much worse by supersizing the size of our homes and cars, living further and further away from work, and inventing new ways to consume massive amounts of energy such as crypto mining and AI as if to wish the problem away.m by acting like it’s already been solved.
@JMG , I heard that the US seeks to increase its electricity production by 25% within 8 years, for AI data centers.
I don’t see how that is possible with a natural gas production that is plateauing or decreasing ?
Thank you
Great essay, I’m looking forward to reading your predictions for the next 25 years or so! One thing that I’m curious about is what will happen when smartphones are no longer tenable. It seems to me that they are a technology that has profoundly transformed (and not for the better) the social and psychological fabric of pretty much the entire world; certainly Europe, America and Asia. The fact that almost everyone has one and almost everyone that has one uses it constantly for everything is one of the most conspicuous characteristics of contemporary society. I think its fuelling a fair amount of the political bipartisan friction that has engulfed western democracies over the last ten or fifteen years. Do you think they’ll disappear abruptly or slowly fade out as the physical hardware and the internet that they run on becomes more and more prohibitively expensive? If you take a walk around any public place 99 percent of people are staring into a smartphone most of the time, even if they are actually talking to other people. Do you think that the quality of our social relations and political discourse will improve when the smartphone is put into history’s rubbish bin? Or have they had an irreversible damaging effect on many people who have come to rely on them (I’m thinking especially of the generation of children who had grown up glued to screens) ?
@JMG
Thanks for the summary/reminder. Makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate seeing it laid out like this even if you’re right you’ve covered it before. I’d also like to add my vote for fifth Wednesday to Will O.’s suggestion of the magical geography of America.
@Everyone re. the wind turbine discussion
It’s really tragicomic if these things turn out to have such pathetically low EROIs, even if the exact value is hard to pin down. Building wind turbines everywhere has become all the rage in my part of inland Norway, and I have the dubious pleasure of seeing a big row of them right from my living room windows. I’ve heard the figure of 25 years operational life for them before, but I won’t complain if it’s even lower, if that means there’s a real chance the local ones might go away during my lifetime. From what I recall there’s also been quite a few technical problems with them already of various kinds.
@Cynthia Christie #114
“If nothing else, no one else is going to waste a vote on an absurdity like that.”
Oh, don’t say that. I was actually going to vote for it until I saw JMG’s reply. 🙂 Would have been both funny and interesting for sure.
Is the solar return of the United States on July 4th 2026 at 5:10 pm in Philadelphia?
All votes have again been tabulated; thank you.
Slithy, nothing could be easier. Have the women be minor characters who’ve already been introduced by name earlier in the film; then they walk by the mainstream character, chatting about some movie failing the Bechdel test.
Anon, that’s my hypothesis. It hasn’t yet been proved.
Mister N, that’s certainly been my observation. Neoprimitivism seems to make a lot of sense when you’re young, enthusiastic, and clueless. Later on, reality has a word or two to say about it all.
Slithy, numbers are easy to churn out, especially if you’re propping up an industry that’s sucking up billions in investment money and government grants, and want to keep the good times rolling. No doubt we’ll see a lot of megawatts put onto the grid from the rush into nuclear I predicted twenty years ago. It’s the economic impact (in resources, labor, and energy, not dollars) of funding power plants that don’t pay for themselves that’s going to be the sticking point, and it’ll be a while before that bill comes due.
Drhooves, I hope you’ll bring up those questions when we get to the more detailed posts.
Daniel, dollars are infinite but energy, resources, and labor are not, and it’s those that concern me; every dollar in increased energy costs means that more energy, resources, and labor have to be diverted from other uses — i.e., the rest of the economy — and put into keeping the oil flowing. At some point that cost starts causing so much economic damage that demand declines. This may be around the time the dollar stops being worth the petroleum it embodies, as you suggest.
Scotlyn, oh, to judge by similar phenomena elsewhere, it’ll cause a temporary boom in jobs, and then a great deal of long-term damage. Ask the people in Pennsylvania who have been left high and dry now that all their fracked sites have been pumped dry…
Gunstone, partly, it conflicts with the myth of progress, but there’s a deeper issue. Our entire economic system depends on growth, and growth depends ultimately on a growing population. Global population contraction bids fair to bring our entire economic system to its knees. I’ll be doing a post on this down the road a bit.
Michael, I’m not familiar with him at all. I mostly read books by dead people, remember. 😉
Scotlyn, a case could certainly be made for that.
Phi, as I’ve noted before, my muse is an unpredictable lady and I don’t always get to choose what I’m writing about. I hope to get back to that at some point.
Justin, you’re most welcome! I found it a very interesting chart to study.
Martin, hmm! I’ll look into that.
Bruno, I’ve tried several times to write a post set in such an alternative future, but the sense of loss is too bitter. Maybe one of these days.
Anon, you really are going through my backlist, aren’t you? Yeah, that post strikes me as still very much spot on.
Luciano, there also aren’t that many places on the Earth’s surface that have the right geographic layout for hydro, and most of those already have dams in them.
Dennis, I know. A bad conscience leads people to do stupid things.
Tony, that’s what’s behind the big rush into new fission technology right now. It still isn’t possible, but investors can still fool themselves for a while.
Corduroy, that requires a post of its own!
Anon, no, it’s for the moment when the Sun reaches the exact spot it was at, relative to the tropical zodiac, at 5:10 pm mean local time, Philadelphia, PA on June 4, 1776. This year, that’s early on the morning of the 5th.
“Tucker Carlson publicly declared he is leaving the Republican Party and claims he is building a new political party. His primary grievance is what he describes as the GOP’s prioritization of foreign interests — specifically Israel — over American citizens. As of mid-2026, no formal party structure has been announced, and political analysts remain skeptical about whether the effort will move beyond rhetoric.”
Yeah, if the Democrats don’t quickly get rid of their pro-Israel candidates, most of the anti-Zionist DSA types that used to support the Democrats are probably going to defect over to Tucker Carlson’s new party.
Gail Tverbergs latest…
Why Oil Shortages May Bring Lower Prices–and Recession
https://ourfiniteworld.com/
@ Slithy Toves #143
“The frustrating thing about arguing nuclear is that believers have some impressive-looking numbers on their side, and it takes a fair amount of nuance to point out what’s wrong with them…”
I’ve often asked a person arguing for nuclear power as a “solution” to peak oil (there are some other arguments for limited use of nukes which do not put them forward as a “solution”), whether they know of any new nuclear power plant that was built entirely from the energy of another nuclear power plant? If nothing else, it makes them go back to the source for the requisite talking point… and they will be hard pressed to find it. 🙂
“Phi, as I’ve noted before, my muse is an unpredictable lady and I don’t always get to choose what I’m writing about. I hope to get back to that at some point.”
Might have to wait a while for some topics. Some of us have been waiting for years for John Michael Greer to get back to talking about peak oil for example.
BorealBear: Really? Thanks, it makes me kind of happy to know that. And yeah, a post about the wretched series, as it now amuses me to call it, from someone with JMG’s takes on why the human animal does what it does would indeed be really interesting. But the author would have to know something about the show and its fandom too, right? It’d be a little much to expect the guy to research the wretched series of all things.
I sometimes really feel like I want to talk about that show with someone who, like me, knows a lot about it, and also like me, is inclined to be critical of it. There don’t seem to be many such people. I do find people who get mad if you tell them starships aren’t real. No shortage of those.
In particular, I want to gore “The City on the Edge of Forever” real good, but no one wants to hear about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, it is hard to see solar thermal of various types ignored ! Instead, we get people thinking everything solar is provided by a super large Solar PV installation, calling their electric hot water heater solar hot water, electric stove solar cooking and electric heat pump space heater solar heating ! I dont think there is a real solar hot water installer in the county atm, although as the subsidies have gone and the interconnect agreements with the power companies are now not in the householders favor, people should wake up to it, but may not due to the lag in thinking, not seeing the true on the ground economic and environmental costs and going along with group think.
You could make low power inefficient solar electric generation in a low tech way, but the panels we have have to have the same type of factories and industries as Integrated circuits, not near as fussy in the printing or layers or clean as ICs, but pretty much. The early failures I have personally seen with PV panels is from things like water infiltration into the panel itself or the connection area, wind ripping connecting wires off, connection from the wire to the actual cells breaking, the protective plastic cover for this area loosening, coming undone due to the adhesive most likely which then allows more water infiltration into that area or lack of support so the wire solder connection to the cells is compromised. The solar cell itself may just slowly degrade in performance, but the panel or array can fail anyways. The glass covering will also yellow and cause a small power output reduction. There is also usually alot of electronics doing various conversions and control that I have seen break for a friend ( inverter), because those are also not as well made as they used to be and because complexity – complexity is like that
For household small uses, a refrigerator and a couple lights, if you can try to minimize all this. How about no electronics to control and convert ( so direct DC usage, see livingenergyfarm.org for examples) inspect your very, very small couple panels to check wires and water seals. If you have a very small battery for light after dark or communications, buy a small nickel iron edison battery if you can as it will last forever if you take care of it, or they should, but as they may now be made in China, who knows ? This is not something we will have access to forever but a little bit can make you more comfortable for 20 or 30 years
And embrace solar thermal. It is negligent that we have houses ( and “housing units”) built with no thought to passive solar gain ! and, of course, to not have gain in the summer. Real solar cooking out in the sun oven or on a wood burning stove, real direct solar heating of hot water. These things will be around much longer.
Dennis @ 165: regarding living far from work: I worked for Pacific Bell in the 1980s, when they decided to centralize administrative functions from all over the Bay Area in the newly-built huge building in San Ramon. Suddenly, employees all over the Bay area, who’d bought homes near their offices, were saddled with long commutes to San Ramon, over bridges and through tunnels. The company tried to ameliorate by sponsoring van pools. But it’s not just Pac Bell in San Ramon. This plays out everywhere large corporations decide to re-organize and move people about. It’s especially hard on two income families.
A woman I knew told me an amusing Bay Area story. She was driving by herself across the San Mateo Bridge (which is a 4 lane bridge several miles long in the south bay) when she noticed a car driving next to her was matching her speed. She sped up, it sped up, etc. She resisted the impulse to glance over to see WTF. It can be dangerous for women driving alone. Finally, she did glance over, and saw it was her husband driving along beside her. When she told me that, I thought “where else but in the Bay Area”? Probably in lots of other places.
@Scotlyn (#65):
Just a belated short footnote on Eddy’s view of matter and energy: she didn’t believe that “matter is simply a denser form of spirit.” Rather, she seems to have believed that the entire universe of matter and energy, time and space, is simply a mass delusion, with no more reality, say, than a nightmare from which it is almost impossible to wake up. (I write, “seems to have believed,” because there are endless, pointless arguments over what she actually thought. Her own prose is anything but crystal clear.)
“…to judge by similar phenomena elsewhere, it’ll cause a temporary boom in jobs…’ (OK, so “some” in the short term) “…and then a great deal of long-term damage.” (But “LESS than none at all” longterm).
Check.
PS, I do remember the “Yes to Jobs, Yes to Europe” posters that were everywhere when I canvassed at doors for a No vote to the *second* Irish referendum to affirm the EU Lisbon Treaty.
At the time I thought – well, do they imagine people will sell their birthright for a mess of pottage? Well, it turns out that, yes, people often trade away long term stores of value for short term (as in “easy come, easy go”) gains.
Perspective is not easily won. 🙂
Thank you JMG for the return to the theme of Peak Oil, which is how my husband and I originally came on board the ADR.
As always, w hen I read many of your posts, I ponder, how can I translate this into how we raise our son? He is now almost 10, still homeschooled, into building out of whatever materials, playing around with water, tubes and pipes,
running around with kids.
We keep a low-energy use profile and still have a landline and a family flip phone, a big garden, a sailboat and canoe. As he gets older, we’d like to guide and expose him more to appropriate tech projects for kids, in particular solar hot water (to take advantage of his scavenged stash of copper pipe). If anyone knows of plans , books, etc that have updated appropriate tech projects, please mention them. We do have solar oven plans. We imagine him in some trade but hope he can work his way into whatever will be cutting-edge appropriate tech when he’s an adult, with a healthy understanding of the long decline!
My husband and I were his age in the Carter years and we remember the push to save energy that was taught in school. Now his generation is is seen as digital natives, addicted to screens, etc , with electric everything being promoted. While he will need to learn to navigate this current reality, we are trying to give him the skills he will need for a world of decline: practical, mental and psychological. It is hard when no one else around you lives this way and his peers are moving into Smartphoneland and video games and he wants to be just like all the other kids!
For those of you who are curious about future colleges that are practical and don’t mind a Catholic outlook, look up College of St Joseph the Worker in Ohio where you graduate with studies in Liberal Arts and the Trades. They are new and I hope we see more schools like that.
On another note, related to modeling skills for the decline, our washing machine no longer drains the wash water and we don’t have the funds to replace it. So I am experimenting with handwashing clothes! Even though we won’t stick with it long-term, at least he’ll know it’s a possibility.
Stay cool everyone experiencing summer heat waves and for Americans, Happy 4th!
Ellen in ME
@chuaquin 157
>> «US and China, are pumping away at their strategic petroleum reserves to keep the oil supply up»
> «I bet EU strategic oil reserves won’t be exhausted before September nor the beginning of fall, but who knows?»
I think China ha s the biggest one, and unlike US and Europe as far as I know they don’t sit at record lows
Wowsers, 93 cents per KWH for peak loading out east.
https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/set-your-ac-78f-nyc-socialist-pleads-residents-fragile-grid-faces-blackout-risk.
For that I’d be trying to put my trolling motor battery on the grid.
Since the weather here is cooler than normal at the moment my AC is in fan only mode. When I do use the AC I set the temperature at 80.
I’m sorry to say the cache issues are back for me. In addition, there is a pretty consistent mismatch between the number of comments indicated on the site home page and on the post itself.
If I might suggest what could be at issue: deciding when to refresh a cache has a reputation as one of hardest problems in computer science.* Probably your new host is configured to hold on to caches much longer than your old host did, in an attempt to avoid reprocessing the page over and over.
That’s understandable, but frustrating in this case, and probably not as useful to them as they think, since many of us are using workarounds that are forcing page refreshes anyway (and probably forcing them to hold on to many different cached versions at the same time).
* A long running joke is that the two hardest problems in CS are naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one-errors.
German super-ironic adage: Beim Fortschritt hat der liebe Gott den Rückwärtsgang vergessen ~ When creating progress the Good Lord has forgotten the reverse gear.
In the past week I’ve re-read The Ecotechnic Future. Anyone who hasn’t read it yet, or hasn’t re-read it recently, I highly recommend reading it if you want the best indication of the ecological, and particularly human-ecological, dimensions of the present and the near future. It looks to me as if scarcity industrialism is starting to get a real toehold into the US.
If the word for success in the 1960s was “plastics” as the movie The Graduate would have had us believe, the word for success in the 2020s and onward is “homeostasis.” Homeostasis helps to explain why there hasn’t been anything other than the usual rationing by price associated with oil despite the closing of the Strait of Hormuz for several weeks.
My husband enjoys watching the Yew-Toob channel What’s Up With Shipping. Most of the time when he’s watching it I’m reading in the chair next to him. It turns out that I can get the gist of what’s being presented by just listening. One of the recent installments looked at shipping issues everywhere else other than the Strait of Hormuz. It turns out that after a delay, shippers have found alternative ways of shipping most of the goods that they would otherwise have shipped through the Straits. The other ways take longer, so they are a drag on the economy, but some knock-on effects, like lower costs for insuring the shipments, partially offset that drag, enough that the predicted governmental rationing hasn’t been needed. Now that those alternative routes are getting better established and have more traffic and the Strait itself is at least partially open, the price of gasoline has dropped. Not down to the pre-attack level, mind you, but down enough to bring back some of the uses that had been curtailed at the price peak. That’s homeostasis in action.
It’s like what happened when I sprained my right ankle for the first time years ago. I had to wrap it up and use crutches for a short time, and it took quite a few weeks for it to heal almost completely, but it never got back to full strength. That led to occasional further spraining, which doesn’t completely heal and so it never fully regains its pre-sprain strength.
Imagine the Strait of Hormuz as an overgrown ankle and the recent attack as the sprain. It’ll sprain again and again as time goes on (more attacks), with the end result being somewhat less shipping through the Strait each time, most of the rest being shipped in other ways, and some economic weakening resulting in some demand destruction. But there is still a lot of demand left to destroy, and enough oil and other resources in the area that can satisfy that demand to ensure that this cycle will repeat for some years. This is why we get a slow ragged decline and not apocalypse.
I’ve been thinking that a revisit of this topic would be timely. Humanity is both in the teeth of a crisis, and yet strangely sanguine — perhaps because people are looking for storm clouds in the immediate term, when this is a complex medium-term train crash. That’s not great. The most dangerous maladies (like declining EROEI) are those which the public do not understand, because they tend to get misdiagnosed as *political* failures, with resulting fireworks.
I think at what scale makes a huge difference in non-fossil fuel energy sources. Huge grid level projects can make big problems, like huge wind turbines for electricity, but back in history handmade windmills of wood and sail cloth for local use milling were not a problem on the environment, including end of life as wood and sailcloth are not a disposal problem. A huge solar PV array project causes alot of trouble, habitat destruction by how much ground the array covers, use of herbicides to keep plant growth away, people driving out to clean off panels, lots of money and resources for transmission lines not to mention the various dc to ac to what voltage level and conditioning and control that has to go on. More herbicides on the transmission line corridors. You can as an intermediary do DC only electric use for just a few low power needs at household scale, for as long as we can access the PV panels. Large hydro has BIg dams that stop fish spawning, that flood land, that needs super big amounts of resources, concrete, fuel, heavy machines, transmission lines and power changing/control as for large solar PV. Historically, we had mills on rivers that did not stop up the whole river built by hand with wood and stone. WHat we can do now at small scale is little micro-turbines for home use, for low power useage does not need much drop if a longer run, you have a little screened wooden box at intake with a regular small pvc or other pipe, that is how much water is taken out, how long that pipe of water goes depends on how much run needed, it goes thru a realy small, it has been a while since I saw the persons set up, I want to say 6×6 inch box for the turbine ? Less than 1×1 ft certainly. and pipe back to the stream. So, the water leaves and is given back with some loss of velocity for that small pipes worth of water. It is likely warmer too. But no discernable stream health damage at this level of useage. It doesnt take much of a creek/stream to be able to get enough output for a few lights and communication and small fridge. Again, maybe this is not long term, but the environmental damage and resource cost is so so much less. Another commonality of these small home scale non-fossil fuel intermediary techs is that the work is done at human scale, using human muscle not big earth moving machinery and it is easier to supply energy( food/basic shelter) for a human.
Obviously, that will not support business as usual, but small amounts of small scale is done with way less resources, by hand by people, and with less damage and can give some welcome comfort or communications.
Small scale building is more sustainable too, earthen building by hand orientated the right way to the sun gives a very comfortable home, small, but no expensive resources needed. No cement or metal or plastic ( it would be nice to have some glass….) no big machinery. SO hard atm to be effectively impossible for most people ( land access and building code prohibitions) but shelter at a small scale is also much more resource saving. Like Cob, wattle and daub, wattle and daub into re-purposed shipping pallets……
“Gunstone, partly, it conflicts with the myth of progress, but there’s a deeper issue. Our entire economic system depends on growth, and growth depends ultimately on a growing population. Global population contraction bids fair to bring our entire economic system to its knees. I’ll be doing a post on this down the road a bit.”
The fact that the first lesson of Econ 101 is “growth over all costs and consequences” is an excellent point made in this article from a couple years ago on how a declining population can be a good thing.
https://npg.org/library/forum-series/in-praise-of-population-decline/
The author insists that one tell the “human extinction” hysterics regarding population decline, “Nothing grows forever “.
Okay I think this is on topic, but if not, you know what to do with it! I’ve noticed a lot of upper salary class types talk in this layer of vague abstractions whenever anything meaningful comes up. It’s like they are spewing a bunch of hot air. They would communicate more if they were silent. I have an extended college professor family member who is a PRO at this. I also decided to listen to twenty minutes of a Mitch Horowitz podcast despite your warnings against him (he is making the rounds right now). The guy talked on this vague level of abstractions for twenty minutes, saying nothing meaningful at all, so I turned it off. I suspect that this vague abstract level of communication is a way people can suppress concrete realities (like Peak Oil). I’m curious on your thoughts on the suppressing action just mentioned, and also your thoughts on this phenomenon in general? BTW, I hear ya on this Peak Oil stuff. I’ve taken minor action but not sure exactly what to do with it. At least I won’t be surprised.
Gunstone at 149,
Oh, the freak out over lack of births is very simple. It takes a team of a dozen or so to keep one dying old man comfortable -ish in his home, based on our experience. Physically fit, healthy, and strong dozen: half family and half hospice.
Who is going to lift the elderly? Bathe them? Carry them to the toilet and back? Medicate them? Be at their beck and call for all the little and big things a dying man cannot do for himself anymore?
Not to mention farm, ranch, manufacture, and all of everything else that supplies a society?
That’s the cause of the freak out: people running into the hard limit that humans are needed to provide for humans, and the longer folks live while not capable of work the more misery those folks will have.
Not The Bee ran an article yesterday on birth numbers, finding that some places are at 1600s numbers of live births. Now, that’s not SO dire, because no where is at 1600s numbers of child fatalities, but it’s not looking great for the folks who will be relying on today’s babies to make them comfortable and supply them with their needs in their later lives.
I expect large family sizes to come back in a big way further down the Long Descent as two things happen: children become a valuable source of household and outside labor again, and the myriad of ways having children is made more difficult by modern laws and customs go by the wayside. Likewise, I expect that overall life expectancy will settle somewhere in the sixties, and prolonged dependent old age will cease to be common as many medical interventions are lost to lack of staffing and supplies.
Dear Mr. Archdruid
Any ideas as to why the price of oil is not higher given the situation with Iran? Some of the alternate media – example The Duran and Mario Nawfal – seem to think the US Treasury is manipulating the oil market big time, with the recent precedent being when the US went off the gold standard in 1971 similar price manipulation kept the price of gold artificially low before hand. Treasury Secretary Bessent has experience as a market trader giving him the technical expertise to make this happen. Do you think this is a possibility? Or is the softness of the price of oil an area where the so called experts are wrong? Brent is below $72 as I write this despite the the tank bottoms being visible.
@Scotlyn #173
That’s a great rejoinder!
One thing that’s frustrating is that nuclear fans keep pointing to France as a nuclear success story, as if France’s nuclear industry hasn’t been the beneficiary of the country’s legendary government largesse and an extremely lopsided trade deal with Niger (which ended only a few years ago). How France fares in the coming years should be quite instructive!
Another country to watch is of course China: it recently began a large-scale build-out of nuclear power. My suspicion is they’ll find that nuclear simply doesn’t scale as well as they’re hoping: powering a country of 70 million people vs. powering a country of 1.4 billion people (20x as many) may prove very different things. It will help that China’s per-capita GDP is much lower than France’s (implying that they are using less energy on average), but not by enough to offset the difference in population size.
Hey JMG
I’ll definitely let you know if I kind a “Game” that explains the Doomer character once I finish the book. So far, the closest I’ve found is the “Kick Me” game, but it’s not a perfect match. But it might be a variant. Unfortunately, it appears that there have been no attempts to describe and list new “games” that build on Eric Berne’s original list, at least in my casual searches so far. I wonder if such information is even publicly accessible?
Bob, thanks for this. It’s an intriguing idea; I’m far from sure she’s right, but we’ll see.
Atmospheric, electricity is convenient but never efficient — only a modest share of the energy in the source ever ends up flowing along the wires, no matter what generation method you have in mind. It was viable during the era when we had more fossil fuel energy than we knew what to do with. Now? The sooner people start replacing electricity with technologies that use low-intensity heat (such as solar thermal) and mechanical energy (such as wind and water), the better.
Scotlyn, one of the lessons I’ve had to learn in this incarnation is that most people will take short term profit over long term happiness and freedom every time. Every. Single. Time.
Ellen, permit me! Stu Campbell, Build Your Own Solar Water Heater (Garden Way, 1978), and Ted Lucas, How To Build a Solar Heater (Ward Ritchie, 1975) are two classics you can still find cheap in the used book market. You might also find these links highly useful:
https://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/WaterHeating/water_heating.htm
https://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/WaterHeating/ISPWH/ispwh.htm
Siliconguy, yep. We just missed triple digits here today — it’s 96°F right now — and is expected to break 100 tomorrow and Saturday.
Slithy, so noted. I’ll pass it on.
Cetzer, they’re going to be unnerved when it grinds into reverse and keeps going backwards.
SLClaire, glad to hear it. Yes, we’re starting to see the first serious signs of scarcity industrialism, with demand destruction, the pruning of unproductive economic roles, and industrial reshoring among those. Oh, and I mustn’t forget technological regression — let’s use the fact that vinyl records were a $1 billion industry last year as our poster child for that. The sheer scale of waste in the US economy is oddly enough an advantage at this point: there’s so much that can be pruned without causing massive trouble that we have a fair amount of room to maneuver, at least for now.
Jason, alas, my readings in history suggest that this is the normal response to the terminal crisis of a society. Everybody just goes on blandly convinced that business as usual can go on forever if only those bad people in the other party were defeated, while the beams and concrete holding up business as usual crack and shudder beneath them.
Atmospheric, exactly! Scale matters — and the most important transition that has to be made to reach toward the economic future is a refocusing on small-scale, locally sourced, locally sustainable technologies.
Gunstone, granted, but the author hasn’t dealt with the tremendous economic impact of declining population. No, we won’t go extinct, but a great many businesses, institutions, and ways of life will — with the elite classes first in line on the chopping block.
Luke, yep. This is an early stage of what Giambattista Vico called “the barbarism of reflection” — the privileged classes become so thickly insulated from reality in a wrapping of high-level abstractions that they don’t notice what’s actually going on around them. Later, the abstractions become more and more actively psychotic as problems get worse. As for what to do with the knowledge of peak oil, the first thing is to realize that there’s not much you can do with it. It’s the inescapable background of the rest of your life, it will shape everything around you in slow and subtle ways, and there’s no way to make it go away. Grasp that, and it becomes easier to find the actions that can improve your life, and avoid the mistakes that can drag you down.
A1, oil is flowing through the straits of Hormuz again; Russia and Venezuela are exporting oil without having to worry about US sanctions; and economic contraction is also causing its share of demand destruction. I suspect the mass layoffs of cubicle class workers in the US are also having an impact, as people in that class use more energy than the rest of us and the layoffs will thus have cut demand noticeably. Doubtless there’s also some market manipulation going on — there hasn’t been an unmanipulated market in oil since about a week after Edwin Drake first drilled for crude oil in western Pennsylvania — but as the global economy tips further into contraction, there’s going to be a surprising amount of slack in demand.
J.L.Mc12, Transactional Analysis was deep-sixed at the end of the 1970s, since it actually helped people solve their problems — not something the psychiatric industry wants. (“A patient cured is a customer lost.”) Very little has been done with it since that time, alas.
For the fifth-Wednesday post, I second the suggestion of “What weapon would I bring to the Apocalypse?”
my vote for the fifth wednesday post, is musings and limmricks how EROI (energy return on energy invested) relates too guy debords definition of the spectacle
Hmm, I am aware of the “barbarism of reflection” but I failed to apply it to my example before your comment. More mind training needed. Thank you for that and the advice.
Atmospheric River @ 187, you mention an important feature, Scale, in reference to non-fossil fuel energy sources. I’d like to stretch that a bit further into the realm of personal transport.
My wife and I just returned to Central Cal from Scotland & France (the latter where she was born and still has numerous friends and relatives.) This time around, I noticed in both places an agreeable replacement: far fewer “BRAAAA!!!” small two-wheeled motor transports, and FAR MORE two-wheeled silent electric kick scooters.
Dean Kamen many years ago came up with a device he thought would revolutionize cities: the Segway. A pretty complete commercial flop, but now the (Chinese, of course) company which many years later bought the rights to the name is producing MILLIONS of electric kick scooters of varying capabilities.
In Blois those things were everywhere! Many if not most riders were wearing helmets and protective gear. An amusing sidelight is that in the EU, throttles on e-bikes are verboten, but kick scooters are allowed throttles. Kick-scooters passing e-bikes, check!
So, scale: if you need personal transport in a city, you won’t be able to go much over 25 MPH due to street design, and though a kick-scooter is much less capable than an e-bike in terms of cargo hauling, it is quite a bit more compact and less expensive. And the competitors are regular bikes (a little cheaper, but noticably slower), regular motorbikes (more cost, more regulation, licensing) or small cars. To me, people are voting and saying that kick-scooters win the Scale transport wars. Coming to a City Near You!
Slithy Toves #56: Yes, I remember the car battery. That was rigged up by the kindly Afghan doctor to keep Tony Stark alive, like you said. Then they hand-forged the tiny reactor together so they could break out of the cave prison.
You’re totally right about the energy conspiracy theory. It’s not completely ridiculous, because the situation the conspiracy theorists are describing seems to be pretty much what is happening in medicine (corporations burying solutions that actually work, so that they can keep people hooked on their second-rate products). But it isn’t in line with reality.
Scotlyn #62: By ‘astral invaders’, I mean entities from a non-physical plane seeking to take over human minds and thereby rule the earth. The short version of my theory is that wherever our text (the Marvel movies) refers to ‘outer space’, the enlightened reader is meant to understand ‘the lower astral’. There’s much more to it, of course!
Scotlyn #65: Sorry about your friend! I really haven’t found a way to help people trapped in this way except by loving them and spending time with them.
Math Fletcher #85: That’s very good to know! Maybe I’ll take a crack at it after all 🙂
JMG #89: Duly noted 🙂
Re: dilithium crystals and Star Trek – reminds me of a story I read decades ago. https://turtledove.fandom.com/wiki/Half_the_Battle It was a post-apocalypse, where engineers were desperately trying to recover/re-engineer much lost technology. Their slogan was, “knowing it’s possible is half the battle” – and in the final scene, they’re re-created the Enterprise (fully working), based on all the guidebooks/schematics they found.
Medium time reader, first time commenter.
My vote is for a discussion of our current world at war (Iran, Ukraine, and others) and how those conflicts tie into each other and peak oil.
Hi John Michael,
Photovoltaic Solar is a wonderful technology, and it kept electricity on at this house, when the wider area was cut off for 5 days after a huge windstorm a few years ago. It just doesn’t scale. In fact I hadn’t noticed at first that nobody else had electricity until it occurred to me how dark the nights had become (and being in a rural area, it’s already ark). Then you notice the little things like people warming themselves in their idling cars whilst charging their USB devices, at an enormous energy expense. It occurred during late autumn…
Anyway, twenty years ago I purchased my first solar panel and battery, and I reckon over the years it’s eaten at least AU$100k or US$70k, maybe more. The house system has 48 panels installed, at an average of around 190W each (9.12kW nameplate capacity). And for that cost, I get 97% annual uptime, which equates to 10 days each year (during three weeks either side of the winter solstice) when a small generator powers a battery charger for a few hours to get some charge back into the batteries. That probably uses about 76L / 20 gallons of petrol annually. If I wasn’t required to work in the wider economy, I could skip that battery charging business.
Some winter days the 9.12kW of installed panels will produce only 2.28kWh which is not enough to do much at all (and a lot of that is consumed by the electronics running the thing). And it is not snowy here. In parts of the world with snow for weeks on end, this technology will simply not work.
But I’m making this stuff work, where I am, right now. And this is as good as it gets. Resilient yes, Cheap no. It’s a hippy technology which doesn’t scale. Here’s what the sort of thing being installed looks like at scale: South Australia swings from three days of 100 pct renewables to worst drought in 7 years. Boom and then bust, as is nature’s way. I don’t see anyone advocating to install the four to five days battery back up I use, mostly because it is a financially ruinous proposition!
I often hear crazy statements of belief about hippy technologies, like: “My house is at latitude 60’N and the build quality is so great that it doesn’t need mechanical heating or cooling” and then you discover that the person spends the winter months elsewhere in a warmer climate. Seriously people… There is a big difference to the words ‘little additional energy’ and ‘no energy’. I remember watching a UK Grand Designs which went for that build challenge at enormous expense, and the warmest room in the house was 17’C / 62’F in winter, and that’s great, but try sitting there doing desk work all day long in such conditions… The occupants may have spent the day, elsewhere which was probably heated, as many people do.
Cheers
Chris
Here in Australia we have hit a weird moment which highlights the intermittent nature with solar. During summer months due to the excess of solar being generated, we will get free electricity for 3 hours up to 24Kwh a day.
So during peak production it make too much and has to be given away. But it does feel like this is just shuffling the funds around as they will just make up the difference in peak hours when people actually use most of the stuff, you know, when the Sun has gone down.
So for 13% of the day, 20% of our energy system is technically free. Doesn’t sound so impressive but it is interesting.
https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/three-hours-free-power-every-day
As for the 5th Wednesday of the Month. Differences between Eastern and Western astrology.
Some folks tend to use the Eastern astrology as they think it is more advanced since it has not had as much suppression over the ages as it has in the west.
Anecdotally June seemed windier than usual even with the Legislature out of session so I pulled up the BPA’a spreadsheet and did a quick and dirty check.
Wind did really well, it wasn’t my imagination. The average for the month was 41% of nameplate capacity. The highest reading was 93%, but the worst was our old friend zero. Yep, dead calm. I did not calculate the length of a possible dunkelflaute though.
Being June solar also did well with a 24 hour capacity factor of 41% (quite the coincidence) thanks to long days and dry weather. July should be about the same as the sky is clearer but the days start getting shorter.
I also confirmed something I suspected. The Wheatridge renewable power station in Oregon has a battery bank. They often feed that into the grid after sundown creating the appearance that the PV panels work in the dark. I compensate for that by whacking off any mention of PV after sundown. During the calm days in the middle of the month that didn’t happen. They are charging the batteries from wind and metering it back on the solar side of the spreadsheet. I’m sure the BPA knows about it so it must be allowable by the contract. For my purposes though batteries don’t count.
Hi JMG,
I apologize in not getting back you sooner, you requested a source on the economics of the small modular reactors (SMRs) that are all the rage these days with the nuclear boosters. This report from 2023 is a pretty good breakdown of the lack luster economics of the whole setup.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544223015980?via%3Dihub
The only real advantage they have over conventional reactors is that because they’re physically smaller the beta decay heat problem that caused Three Mile Island and the Fukushima reactors to melt is significantly lessened because the reactors are physically smaller and contain less nuclear fuel. However, that’s largely irrelevant to the discussion of economics; economies of scale make the cost per kWh worse if the individual reactors are smaller. It’s why only militaries have nuclear powered ships; SMRs are essentially naval reactors on land (there are of course different design proposals for SMRs but to the first approximation this holds), and no private company can afford to run a nuclear powered cargo ship.
If you want I can send you some more technical reports on SMR engineering but the dismal economics is, in my opinion, the most important fact.
Anyway, I want to say that I’m excited in some ways for the changes, it opens up the possibilities for a high tech landscape that is very different than the dreary “Amazing Stories” future sold by politicians and tech grifters alike. The whole appropriate tech scene, outfits like Low-Tech magazine and your writings of course have helped me outline a future that is vastly more exciting than anything on sale in the Bay Area or Shenzhen. I don’t get why Amazing Stories or Mad Max are the two fantasies most people crave, there are other options and a lot of them are extremely exciting. I hope you’ll talk about those other futures; your essays The Steampunk Future and The Steampunk Future Revisited live in my head rent free and the world you sketched out in them was very exciting.
Best,
JZ
Boreal Bear (#79) – If you think your local touring area is unexpectedly interesting, have you even taken a teaspoon of garden soil under a microscope? It’s another world to explore.
JMG – The fine folks at Doomberg.com quoted a recent report from a world energy analytic group that observed the Coal, Oil, and Gas energy production/consumption have each established new records in the last year. China burned more coal than the rest of the world, combined. Despite growth in renewable energy projects, it’s not displacing supply; just adding to it.
@ Chris in Ferndale
I know people who do desk work at 62’F, I can also if it is dry cold, I cannot if it is humid cold like at my house I like it better if it is closer to 65’F. But the colder parts of the USA where i know a few people the moisture in winter is snow and not rain and 62’F indoors is more comfortable. You I think are like my climate where winter is no snow and there is humid wetness with the cold, that is hard on my joints at this age !
My experience with solar is alot like yours, but smaller needs and set up. And, of course, the ability to get modern PV solar panels will go away at some point in the future, but it is nice to have a bit now.
I have spent way less than you on solar PV because I have a smaller system. I do not run any space conditioning on electric ( no A/C, no electric heat) and I have solar thermal hot water heating or just do without. I do have my own well, but I am not commercial farming. So, over 28 years spent about 22k USA dollars (panel change out and battery change out in the past couple years, so 13k made it 25 or 26 years, then another 9k to refresh to get the next 30 years, if/when the inverter goes, that will be 3k, so 12k for next 30 years is a steal compared to California electric prices) 3kW of panels, 11.5kWh of battery back up. I just had a 4 day power outage over last Christmas, did not run out of power, could have gone longer, at least another day, but I only used a portable single induction burner off the batteries and also heated food off the woodstove, I kept laptop, modem and handheld HAM radio and 17cuFt refrigerator/freezer going also no problem as well as a light. I do not pump water or the large electric range during storms with no sun, I just live with alot less water pressure during that time out of the tanks, I have 10k gallons of tank water a little higher than house. I can water the garden off of pump is off low pressure, but you could not run commercial irrigation here without powering up the pressure pump.
I have never found it to be difficult living off the solar or that I need that much power, or found it to be expensive. I seem to use a lot less power than other households. I have the same inverter that is 28 years old, knock on wood, solar PV is not a buy once it lasts forever, but it has lasted a long time. I do know that electricity will get less available including home systems like this as we go thru decline. I could have a smaller system, it used to be 2kW of panels and that was fine, personally for me I could have less. I was talking to a distributer last month, and prices now for battery storage of the amount I have which is 5 days or so is $6k USA. I think it is more expensive in Australia than here. What is high here is labor costs, so I could not afford to hire a company installing in todays world, if doing it today I would go self install smaller, DC only and change to a DC refrigerator.
@ Ellen in ME: if your washer isn’t draining, most likely the drain pump has failed. They aren’t hard to replace, and it probably costs about $25. Before you replace it, make sure the hose isn’t kinked or clogged (lint, coins, etc). If it is a newer front loader, good chance you have a filter for the pump, which could also be clogged.
Happy Fourth of July to you too.
RE: Iranian oil being shipped again, they’re having a hard time finding buyers (as per Zerohedge https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/iran-runs-big-problem-no-buyers-its-oil-full-tankers-pile-china).
Some analysts say we’re on the cusp of doomsday and everything falling apart all at once, while others say a massive commodity super cycle is gearing up and there’s oodles of moolah to be made if one is positioned correctly. Meanwhile, the slow and relentless forces of depopulation and resource depletion work away in the background like flowing water eroding a stone.
JMG, your blog always acts as a rudder to help me steer a proper course through all the rhetoric. Many thanks!
What an interesting time we live in…
Anonymous @ 171, Yeah, if the Democrats don’t quickly get rid of their pro-Israel candidates, most of the anti-Zionist DSA types that used to support the Democrats are probably going to defect over to Tucker Carlson’s new party.
That is the plan. Round ’em up and throw a blanket on them. These same DSA candidates, and others are talking out loud about scary stuff like Medicare for All, etc., that might cost certain people a lot of money. There is a much more at stake here than the fate of Israel. The new Gov. of New Jersey, NOT DSA, signed an executive order which declared a moratorium on utility prices. On the day she was sworn in. She could be president some day.
Aha! I did figure out something I could do. Air conditioning threshold was set to 76 and decided to raise it to 78 since 76 was pretty comfortable. I might go higher after I test this out, we’ll see. (yes I know there’s probably some hardcore folks who are above 78, respect). I read you save 3% of net energy costs per degree, so I’ll gladly take that 6% back for now.
Looks like British Muslims are gearing up for mass physical training exercises and self defense lessons:
https://unherd.com/newsroom/5pillars-editor-calls-for-mass-physical-training-programme-for-muslims/?edition=us
So who’s counting the votes this time? Misconsecrated spectres?
I’m sorry. That’s the whole point of the comment. To say “misconsecrated spectres.”
If that’s the name of a mid heavy metal band some years down the road please know I’m not in it. 😉
Clay Dennis #111 and JMG,
That is very depressing. I really had hopes 20 years ago that a wind- and solar-powered world of a 4:1 or 5:1 EROEI would be able to help move toward something resembling JMG’s ecotechnic future.
Here in Hillsdale County, Michigan, there is strong local opposition to ongoing installation of large photovoltaic installations on thousands of acres.
I have been bucking the trend by quietly supporting the project on the grounds of the more optimistic assumptions of 20 years ago, but there is indeed no point in these projects if the EROEI really is more like 1:1 or less.
I think it is very important to try to get these calculations right, and in a very fine-grained kind of way that takes into account the exact nature of the technology, the scale of the project, etc. In my opinion, it warrants the creation of a new engineering discipline specifically devoted to the task of doing this properly.
Hi JMG,
Terrific post and I’m looking forward to the follow-ons in this series. Art Berman caused a minor controversy a few months ago when he labeled Peak Oil as a “failed paradigm”. His point was not that M. King Hubbert was wrong, but that the idea that passing the peak of 2005 would lead to a linear increases in prices turned out to be wrong.
I’m the first to admit I was wrong about that too and was just completely baffled that the whole fracking business–which was built on a very rickety financial foundation–continued as long as it did. I know you have stated many times that the twilight of petroleum products wouldn’t lead to a straightforward increase in prices, but violent whipsaws in price. But even on this blog there have been a number of predictions of $200 per barrel price spikes discussed that never materialized.
My current thinking is that financial gimmickry was totally misunderstood by the Peak Oil movement, and made it look like a wrongheaded set of ideas. What has happened rather than $200 per barrel (which could still happen some day) is widespread inflation. I think we will see more nuclear, more alternative petroleum like fracking and oil sands, and all of it will be paid for by financial hocus pocus which will one way or another lead to steady inflation. It isn’t obvious that that is the way depletion would be expressed, but at least so far it seems to be.
JMG,
I have a question for you: Why now? Why are you choosing to pick up the Peak Oil theme again just now, rather than, say, five years ago, or five years in the future from now? Does it have something to do with the current phase of the process of decline?
ps: My vote for this 5th Wednesday is (yet another one for) technologies that work but are ignored or denigrated.
Once again, all votes have been tabulated.
JPC, back in the 1970s, I had the chance to take in a talk by George Scithers, then the editor of one of the major science fiction magazines. One of the things he did was walk us all through some of the slang that editors used, and sometimes scrawled on stories they weren’t going to publish. “Tomato Surprise” was one of those — it was the label for a story in which the author pulled some kind of absurd surprise at the end, the sort of thing that has readers’ eyes rolling so far back into their heads they get a good view of their own pituitary glands. That phrase and that story were made for each other.
Chris, yeah, I’ve seen the same sort of thing. The sad thing is that you can get very close — but there are always the cold days where you need to fire up a fireplace insert, or what have you, and the more windows you want the worse it performs, etc. But you know that better than I do!
Michael, yep. Intermittent resources are wonderful, but they won’t power a 24/7 grid.
Siliconguy, thanks for the update.
John, no worries — I need it for a post that’s probably more than a month out. Thank you! As for the more interesting futures ahead, yes, very much so.
Lathechuck, yep. I wonder if anybody’s calculated how much of that Chinese coal went to power the production of components for solar PV and wind turbines…
Tim, that doesn’t surprise me. Russia’s probably shipping every spare drop of oil to China right now, since its own refinery capacity has been hit by Ukrainian strikes.
Anon, that is to say, they’re forming into an army. I know how this story ends.
Denizen, unfortunately we don’t have the option of a smooth transition to an ecotechnic future at this point, or even a bumpy one. It’s going to have to be built after the rubble stops bouncing — and there’s a lot of rubble to bounce. The new engineering discipline you call for would be a good thing, but at this point I don’t think most people want to know!
Samurai_47, Berman was right that the standard version of peak oil was wrong, because it ignored the influence of politics and economics on energy. It took me some years to incorporate those fully into my analysis, for that matter — thus my mistaken predictions of $200-a-barrel oil, and of decreasing liquid fuels availability even with unconventional oil added in. Inflation is one of the ways depletion has played out; another is the fantastic hypertrophy of the economy of unpayable IOUs — the notional value of the derivatives market right now is $1.2 quadrillion, for example, and not one dollar of that represents any form of real, nonfinancial wealth. More on this as we proceed!
Denizen, because I’m pretty sure that we’re close to some significant changes in energy availability and price, and the more people who understand the underlying issues, the better prepared they will be to negotiate an awkward interval.
@ Teresa #29 “People change their behavior for two reasons: cost and ideology.”
To quote Vaclav Smil “If you want people to change, hit them were it hurts, their wallet!”
He also related to this weeks topic, he said “We don’t need energy conservation, we need a rational use of energy. You don’t need a car that takes 6 minutes to walk around or a house that has 200 lights outside at night.”
@ JMG “Oh, and I mustn’t forget technological regression — let’s use the fact that vinyl records were a $1 billion industry last year as our poster child for that.”
I missed that piece of news, good to hear. Just looking at the winds of society, you can see the push back becoming much stronger. It may be the one good side effect of the stupid “AI” push in that they forced it so hard that many are questioning a lot of what was proposed as ‘the future’.
Also as an aside, if you want to have fun with an AI believer, get them to talk only in present tense. Not what ‘could be’ or ‘might happen’, and suddenly they don’t sound so high and mighty.
@ Chris # 202 “I often hear crazy statements of belief about hippy technologies, like: “My house is at latitude 60’N and the build quality is so great that it doesn’t need mechanical heating or cooling” and then you discover that the person spends the winter months elsewhere in a warmer climate. There is a big difference to the words ‘little additional energy’ and ‘no energy’.”
There was one early brilliant example on Grand Designs that did it wonderfully. The plan was $80,000, over 12 months and he would do the bulk of the work himself using appropriate technologies and materials.
It was a big A-frame house made with mostly hay bales for the walls so it had loads of insulation. Added in a wood fire for heat during the winter.
Ended up coming under budget and made in 9 months. Plus had the additional heating source to get through the winter months but due to the amount of insulation it didn’t need it much. And the whole place was very homely like a hobbit hole.
It was a brilliant example of what we could be doing while also being honest about what could be done. There is a reason why they never did a project like that again on the show, because it didn’t have the drama and completely went against modern convention.
In a recent issue of his wesbite, International Man, Doug Casey says the following about AI:
https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-the-spacex-ipo-the-ai-super-bubble-and-the-bells-ringing-at-the-top-of-the-market/
“There are hundreds of data centers being built, some of them with buildings that are scores of acres in size, full of servers, storage, and cooling equipment. Several will need 8 or 9 gigawatts of power, each. I’m not sure most people know that the typical nuclear power plant is about one gigawatt and costs $5-10 billion. The numbers are actually insane.
“This is certainly the largest bubble in history, by an order of magnitude. Hundreds of billions and even trillions are being allocated to it—and that’s within the context of the Bubble Economy, which has been ongoing for a decade. I’ll wager most of these buildings, and their contents, will be write-offs. Strange artifacts that may yet be America’s answer to Egypt’s pyramids.”
If Casey is correct about this (and I am no expert, so I can’t be sure!), then I have to wonder if these things can actually be made, technically, to work at all. Never mind the economics – I am talking about if they will even work, or if they will be “duds”?
Thoughts, anyone?
@Ambrose #195; JMG obviously would bring his ban hammer. And for good measure he would sick his trained black hole Fido on insolent comers.
@ JMG; Well I got thoroughly stupefied this past 48 hours by noticing , by way of this comments ( tip of the hat to A1 and Tim PW ), that Oil is again flowing trough Hormuz. Color me surprised, I thought this will last at least till September. Just when I thought I’ve figured it out and all the talk is rubbish. I wonder what backstage deals one could see if one had the capacity to be politically literate. Maybe the records of the Yithians have the true account.
As for the fifth Wednesday: I will join the working but neglected technology crowd. I have been having a whole series of contemplations on something along those lines in farming. There are several expressions that pop up in modern farming: intensive and extensive farming. A chicken fattened on grain for meat is intensive, a rabbit raised on grass is extensive. Now a days if one goes discussing it with any authority in practice, you will get shoutd down, that only intensive farming works, because extensive farming is not profitable. The hidden factor: extensive farming can be done without diesel. Has anyone of you heard of how cubans started raising three-use cattle hybrids in the 90s and offering oxen plowing courses after the fall of the USSR. No, just me.
Best regards, V
Hi, JMG:
Thank you for picking up this topic again; I look forward very much to your updates.
I am one of those people who for some reason has a hard time grasping the concept of “long bumpy decline” vs “short sharp drop”. I keep thinking in terms of apocalypse. Not because I want to be a mule-head but, for some reason, my mind literally has trouble grasping the concept of “long bumpy decline”. But I remind myself of all your comments about it over the years, so thank you for those!
I do wonder what’s going to become of all the formerly-office-fauna who are being dislodged with AI as the excuse. How will they be able to stay alive– or will they? Will there perhaps be a push to “chase illegals out of the country and give those jobs to Americans” wink wink? They will wail and cry all the way to their crop-picking and small-manufacturing jobs but at least they’ll be helping to generate useful stuff.
I should dig “The Limits To Growth” out of storage and re-read it. But I suspect that the curves for fuel resources and for population are inflecting right on schedule. It’s kind of eerie to watch, actually.
@samurai_47, that, or the oil markets are completely rigged, people can look at other indicators.
One of the Peak Oil predictions was that food will get more expensive and of poorer quality/choice.
JMG,
Thank you for having me in your virtual living room.
Something I do not see discussed often is that as we run out of disposable energy, the entire system most people get their food from will stop being viable. Supermarkets are only possible with constant refrigeration, with some products needing refrigeration in the truck itself, and the end point, the home refrigerator, also requires a constant supply of electricity.
Where I live I catch some glimpses of strain on the system, like a local supermarket had to limit milk cartons per customer. I think fermention, drying and canning are worthwhile skills to pick up. It is not just a matter of availability.
When large scale of produce refrigeration will stop being economicaly viable, we are likely to see the market flooded with cheap in season produce, only to disappear for a year. Smart and knowledgable families will preserve those in bulk for year long consumption. This new pattern will take some getting used to.
Anyways, thank you for reading this. I am off to the market to pick up some freshly caught tulipia. I plan on cooking it with fermented tomatoes I preserved from a spring harvest a few months ago and pickled lemons from my lemon tree from back in February.
Have a nice weekend!
“Most of the energy available to the economy – perhaps 95% in complex advanced economies, and 90% or so in emerging market countries – is required simply for system maintenance. It has to be devoted, not just to repairing and replacing infrastructures and productive capabilities, but also to the support of the population.
The West has long since passed the ECoE threshold beyond which growth becomes impossible, and the same is now happening in less complex, more ECoE-resilient EM economies.“?
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2025/12/21/316-the-class-of-26/
“That is the plan. Round ’em up and throw a blanket on them. These same DSA candidates, and others are talking out loud about scary stuff like Medicare for All, etc., that might cost certain people a lot of money. There is a much more at stake here than the fate of Israel. The new Gov. of New Jersey, NOT DSA, signed an executive order which declared a moratorium on utility prices. On the day she was sworn in. She could be president some day.”
Meanwhile you have establishment Democrats like James Carville saying that there needs to be a schism in the Democratic Party since they don’t want to be in the same party as DSA candidates.
Hello JMG,
I vote on Technologies which will see re-use and re-emergence as we move down the descent.
More likely is that Tucker Carlson will end up supporting anti-Israel candidates on the Democratic Party since there’s more of them in the Democratic Party than there are in Tucker Carlson’s currently nonexistent party.
Today, July 3, thirteen years ago, they announced
An End to Eight Years of The Oil Drum
Reading a few of the comments makes me realize what a tremendous resource TOD was.
@ JMG re Slithy Toves comment @ #183
I am NOT computer literate, but just thinking out loud here as a lay reader…
There are specific moments when the cache on this blog’s comments NEEDS to be refreshed (from the reader’s point of view) and that is every time that you approve and answer a new tranche of comments. If the “refresh cache” command can be somehow harmonised with your own actions, that would likely keep us all happy. 🙂
@ Slithy Toves #199
Sadly I have been shut out of my friend’s life as a “negative influence” (not that I ever said a word, mind you!). They’ve recently done a complete overhaul, excising most of their friends, and finding more “positive” people (toadies?) to surround themselves with.
I am also forbidden to pray for them.
I am dipping my toe in a simple expression of thankfulness to the universe for having known them. FWIW
@Gunstone re. birth rates (if I may)
Thanks for bringing up this question. It’s something I’ve been wondering about too, why the idea of falling birth rates has such a grip on the imagination. Even in spaces like this very comment section, or “alternative green” spaces generally where you’d think people get it, I’ve seen a surprising number of voices expressing dismay at the idea. Now, of course there are very real pragmatic reasons it’s a potential problem, and I think JMG and BoysMom have covered them well here. I’m not sure that’s the whole story, though.
IIRC, some years back our host did a post (or series of posts?) where he introduced a distinction between the “pragmatic” and “mythical” mode of thinking, or labels to that effect. My speculative feeling is that most people, even on the “green” side of things, feel that the idea of a contracting population is deeply wrong and abhorrent on the mythical level, because it’s a kind of betrayal of vitality and purpose. I think it instinctively feels to us human beings like any society that’s shrinking has lost its way and its sense of purpose. It feels like a surrender to death and entropy in mythic terms, even if it makes a lot of pragmatic sense in a world in heavy overshoot. My two cents, anyway.
@Lathechuck #206
I’ll admit I haven’t actually gone and looked myself, but I do know there’s an amazing variety of life there. Good point and suggestion.
@SLClaire #185
The Ecotechnic Future is my favorite book by our host, at least out of the ones that don’t deal with occultism and spirituality, so I’m in full agreement there. I love how elegantly it turns the Progress vs Apocalypse binary into a ternary, and how JMG is willing to give a fair hearing to the idea that the Industrial Revolution really could have changed the course of human history in a permanent way, just not in the way the adherents of Progress think. There’s something so amusing to me in the idea that our civilization isn’t at all the peak of sophistication, but rather “the first, clumsiest and most wasteful example of a Technic society” (to paraphrase from memory). It’s also exciting when thinkers are willing to go out on a limb and theorize about the deep future, and I think the Ecotechnic vision is both plausible and very original. At least to me, but then again I’m not as well read as JMG or some of the commenters here. But yes, the Ecotechnic Future is well worth a read for sure. And it does feel like the first winds of scarcity industrialism are stirring around us.
@JMG
Migrant, money is nothing but magic. It only has value because people believe it has value — why else would anybody accept a few scraps of limp and greasy paper, or a few magnetic charges in a data center somewhere, in exchange for a sandwich?
Ouch. That landed solidly.
My proposal for 5th Wednesday: why and how did magic transform from being the preserve of esoteric self-improvement societies to being the fundamental basis of our society (not just fiat currency, but advertising, propaganda, media narratives etc) somewhere in the years after the end of the Great War?
@ Robert Mathiesen #178
“…she seems to have believed that the entire universe of matter and energy, time and space, is simply a mass delusion, with no more reality, say, than a nightmare from which it is almost impossible to wake up.”
Yes… very difficult to “wake up”! 😉
I’m thinking that this approach is sort of like “willing” the world, along with everybody in it, to stop existing – or at least to stop existing so densely and unmoveably – so that I can have things be exactly as I want them to be. And, by “everybody”, I am not only meaning other humans, but I do mean them, too! (and note that this also equates to wishing all other “beings” to reduce themselves to “things” – from “you’s” to “its” – so that I can manipulate them into aligning with my will alone).
It is an approach that definitely has its limits! 🙂
@Boysmom
“Who is going to lift the elderly? Bathe them? Carry them to the toilet and back? Medicate them? Be at their beck and call for all the little and big things a dying man cannot do for himself anymore?
Not to mention farm, ranch, manufacture, and all of everything else that supplies a society?”
The Japanese have been thinking about this for many years, and the Chinese – facing their own demographic funnel – are following on. The answer to your question is: humanoid, intelligent, emotionally aware robots.
Bearing in mind that this is a rapidly-developing technology sector, this happened a couple of days ago:
https://www.tbsnews.net/world/chinese-firm-unveils-hyper-realistic-humanoid-robots-companionship-1477296
It’s the future iterations of this tech that will be performing the tasks you describe; they’ll be manufactured on such a scale in China’s dark factories that they’ll be the default solution everywhere there’s an ageing population.
That’s my prediction, at least.
In the UK they are turning farmland into fields full of solar panels. Just wondering what that will do to the farmland? How long before it can ever be used for crops or animals again? Also why don’t they use industrial estates and put the panels on the roofs there?
People really have no idea of the complex constraints at work here and they don’t really want to know either. They would much rather believe that there are solutions but sinister forces are stopping these easy solutions to the dilemmas we face. They don’t want to believe there’s no solution and cushy lifestyles will be on the line eventually.
I was speaking to an Extinction Rebellion (remember them?) person back in the day about the issues. She meant well but was holding a petroleum tealight to show her concern for the planet.
JPC (#200) “Half the Battle” I think it’s a good idea to keep in mind, despite the fact that building a Star Trek vehicle is absurdly absurd (but appealing to a certain SF population). The same story (not that I’ve actually read it) could have ended with them consulting old textbooks and slipping their slide rules, all to build a wind-powered well-pump for their livestock. It could have been a shocking anti-climax, to emphasize how much technology had been lost in the mean time! “Hurray! We can keep six cows, instead of just one!”
Luke Z (#212) Re: air conditioning. We’re near Washington DC, where the temp was over 100F yesterday, and forecast to be just as hot today. We’ve found that, when it’s that hot outside, we can turn up the thermostat to at least 81F and be comfortable. This is because the A/C is taking humidity out of the air, so we can cool ourselves effectively with sweat. If it were only 80F outside, the A/C wouldn’t run, and the house would get stuffy. I was up for a few minutes at 4:30 this morning, and the temperature above my concrete deck on the west side of the house was still 90F! It had dropped to 85F by 7 AM.
All – Through a strange turn of events, I find myself in possession of a 2018 plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (Mitsubishi Outlander SUV), with 117,000 miles on the odometer, and a new main battery (which cost about $8000). I’m learning to drive it (trying to optimize efficiency), and I’d be happy to hear about other people’s experiences with similar vehicles, or to describe mine. It gives me choices: ECO mode? Normal mode? EV-save mode? Do I trust the on-board computer that selects between modes automatically? It has SIX options for regenerative braking!
I’m nearing retirement age (5 years?), so even though I currently commute 50 miles a day (round trip), I’ll be driving a lot less in retirement (and expect to still have this car).
In a way, owning this car is a bet that the cost of electricity will rise more slowly than the cost of gasoline. We shall see.
Hi JMG
Many thanks for the post and the future promise of more around this issue that, as you, I think will define the future decades even if it won’t appear in the news.
I have a question for you: it seems that one of the biggest mistakes of the peak-oil movement bak in the first decades of this century was the focus of the peakoilers was around the EROI depletion, and that an industrial civilization will not survive an EROI of less than let say 10, but I am not so sure about this assertion, because if the NET energy is growing, there is room for maintaining the existing industrial infrastructure at the global scale.
Of course the infrastructure of the western countries have been depleted (mainly by the decision to destroy the industrial base of the western countries by our oligarchs) but with the ascent of China and others developing countries thanks to the globalization,, the net effect is an huge increase in the industrial infrastructure and production/consumption (from 2005 to today), and the pace of construction of civil infrastructures (roads, railways, dams, airports, etc…)in, for example, China, India, Vietnam, and other big developing countries more than compensate the decay in the western world, and all of this can be seen in the global consumption of steel, concrete, plastic, copper, etc…is increasing almost every year from 2005 (of course, an exception is the Covid pandemic but not for the “good” oil depletion).
Only the financial gimmickry cannot explain the fracking “miracle” or the tar sand use or the other low quality energy sources around the world. They will last more than the peak-oil movement thought
The developing countries, and soon the developed countries, are re-turning to the coal and other bad quality fossil fuel sources, and even if the existing EROI is not as good as before, the net effect is an increase in the net energy put into the economic system, of course with an accelerated pace of CO2 emissions, ecological destruction, etc….
IMHO the system is adapting to the quality depletion of the energy sources but it seems to me that the decrease in the EROI must be much more severe (less than 3-5 or something like this) to have a dramatic impact in the global scale, and stop the growth. This still is not happening, but I am sure it will happens but I don’t know when but probably many decades ahead.
I think, also, that the geopolitics will have a tremendous impact in the future of the energy sources, potentially affecting the availability even more than the natural depletion.
Cheers
David
Mr. Nobody # 141:
“I really have to wonder how many people who identified with neo-primitivism in the two-thousand aughts simply outgrew it a long time ago.”
I remember during “old good times” peak oil online “community” in Spanish language, sometimes a neo-primitivist (or maybe I must name him as “anarcho-primitivist”) tried to sing peakers his siren chants to make them to join their favorite ideology, but he always failed in this entrysm strategy. His reasonings were very weak and poor…
In spite of anarcho-primitivists frantic efforts to make everybody believe that Mr. K. (the in-famous Unabomber) was a hard kind of anarcho-primitivsts, when this man was already in prison, even Mr. K. (who hadn’t anything to lose due to his life sentence) denied he was a neo-primitivist. Even he mocked them in one of his prison writings (indeed, he could be labelled easier as a Neo-Luddite).
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Gunstone # 149:
“I don’t understand the “extinction” hysteria that surrounds how many describe certain countries number of children.”
Maybe because governments (and elites) always need a good cannon fodder reserve for likely wars in a near future?(I mean, before that according Faustian timelines, robot soldiers fill the battle fields at middle or long term. I doubt it…).
Maybe because retirement pensions for the elder are a Ponzi scheme which won’t last forever? (even with massive migration, declining working population and more older people means…a gap in the funding of social security).
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Michael # 150:
No, I haven´t had the “pleasure” of having read him, though I also think that, according his Faustian ideas about space colonization, he isn’t worth to be read, at least IMHO.
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Luciano # 164:
I think you’re right in your ideas about hydro power, but I’d to add to your depiction of it a very long time problem, which could put an end for its operation in one or two centuries. What will happen when big dams used for hydro-electricity will be filled with sediments? (a problem especially fast in dams across mountain rivers). When the Long Descent has moved forward to some extent, there won’t be enough energy nor raw materials to build big dams again.
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The Corduroy # 167:
“I think its fuelling a fair amount of the political bipartisan friction that has engulfed western democracies over the last ten or fifteen years.”
Yes, I can say, in the short form: Smartphones+”Social” media = populist parties rampage.
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(To be continued)
I think Western Europe is likely to just skip scarcity industrialism completely and go straight to a salvage society.
Speaking of maintenance costs for wind turbines, the budget for this place is going to have an overrun.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yHwbLs3k4nI&pp=0gcJCWQCo7VqN5tD&ra=m
That was an expensive windstorm in Highmore SD.
Mr. Greer, thank you for a much needed post on the truth about Peak Oil, arguably the most misunderstood of all topics. I recall that you used to mention that most people’s response to Peak Oil would inevitably consist of them saying “Eh, they’ll think of something”. This was definitely a common response to hear back in the 2000s or even the 2010s when even Americans who were considered quite “poor” still enjoyed a high standard of living and a low cost of living, as even a person living on minimum wage in the 2000s still had a car, video games, and an apartment or rental house of their own. Things have changed a lot by the present year of 2026, however, as many people who seem to have very high incomes report being unable to maintain the standard of living that was once considered normal and just can’t understand why. Do you think the thought stopper “They’ll think of something” has given way to something else, such as unthinking rage and conspiracy theories, now that a rosy future of guaranteed consumerism now seems less and less realistic for the people who are getting crushed by inflation, debt, and (more recently) mass layoffs?
First, I’d like to wish every American commenters a Happy Fourth of July on advance…
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JMG # 170:
“Global population contraction bids fair to bring our entire economic system to its knees.”
Indeed, you can guess a global population contraction (for example) would put an end to housing especulative bubble, like the current one is happening here. Less “native” people and less migration from poor countries (where birthrate will go down a bit later than in the West, but eventually it will go more and more down); this means less demand of houses with a huge houses offer, so do the math…Housing prices would fall in the long term, and housing business would be in trouble too.
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Robert M. # 178:
Well, I’m not a Buddhist, but I tend to share some Buddhists idea that human life is LIKE a dream. Please, notice this ideas doesn’t equate life as a dream, it’s a comparison. I think in our dreams we do what we want, but in real life our will isn’t almighty, so…there are something real outside our minds which prevents us to get everything we want.
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Ellen # 180:
“our washing machine no longer drains the wash water and we don’t have the funds to replace it. So I am experimenting with handwashing clothes!”
Beyond the binary choice/dilemma between electric washing machines and old school handwashing, I’m thinking now in hand washing machines…Indeed, there are some models, according what I’ve seen online, by now only for helping poor countries people. But who knows?
https://www.ingenia.org.uk/articles/the-manual-washing-machine-for-low-income-communities/
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The Arkane…# 181:
Maybe you’re right about China, indeed I’ve read the same statement in another online sites. In addition to this cautious Chinese behavior about oil reserves, they’ve got the Russian oil backup…
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Slithy T. # 192:
“One thing that’s frustrating is that nuclear fans keep pointing to France as a nuclear success story”
Yes; in addition to French Achilles Heel (its African uranium reliance: geopolitics rules…), there’s an elephant in the room, when you see our Northern neighbour country car fleet isn’t very electrified, and its trucks and heavy machines rely in diesel fuel yet…including trucks and machines used to build and supply France proud nuclear power…
Bryan Allen #198 Atmospheric River
Kick-scooters are dangerous.
JMG,
Last thing on the subject of “the disquiet one encounters when talking about the necessity of resource availability” and its an observation born from years of work.
The need for the “right” amount of money, man-power, skill, time, and materials on hand “before” one starts a project can be conveyed and received to all involved in a project “except” the STEM personnel i.e. the Engineers, the Programmers, etc…
Any operator, any accountant, any mechanic, any manager, anyone in logistics/supply, heck even the New guys can recieve and understand the need for every resource required for a job to be planned/coordinated for that job so that it is all on site giving the project a chance of success…. but God help me the Engineers and the broader STEM group cannot get it. No, the STEM crowd will push for any project at anytime without anything being set for it and if you set things up for them (because you have to) they start trying to throw it away because it’s not efficient enough for them.
And it just comes down to the STEM crowd being given all these resources (money, man-power, time, materials) to play with without ever having to pull it all together on time and on their own. God help you if they get put into a management role….
And now on the absurd end of energy news…
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/eu-court-says-private-jet-manufacturing-can-be-labelled-green-investment-2026-06-24/
“EU court says private jet manufacturing can be labelled green investment”
hahahahhahahaha =)
No, this is not an Onion or Babylon Bee article! Elites here are really showing their hand. It’s painfully obvious now that they don’t believe in their own “green energy” hogwash propaganda.
Here’s a data point that might interest you. I’m glad I realized early on that the most house i’d ever be lucky to own is a townhouse. The single family home dream is becoming more and more of a passing fantasy. Granted I knew early on that I didn’t want a large house. Especially one in the suburbs.
https://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate/articles/harvard-housing-report-darker-message-070900112.html?guccounter=1
It does frustrate me that not enough people realize that it doesn’t matter if they want it, what matters is if they can afford it. I’ve learned that people will let their greed and selfishness drag them to hell.
I’m relishing this return to discussions about Peak Oil. Many thanks to you for helping me (all those years ago) reign in my apocalyptic tendencies and focus on learning skills for the Long Descent. Last month, the homeschooling Nature School that I run put on a community workshop teaching people how to build rocket stoves out of bricks. We had 60 people show up and now everyone knows how to build an outdoor stove that cooks with twigs and doesn’t heat up your house, during the dog days of Summer.
I vote for “the rearrangement of living arrangements that might develop in a lower energy economy.”
JMG,
The current illogical confusion among our elites with regard to energy and resource policy almost makes one yearn for the simplicity of Klaus Schwab and the “let them eat bugs” policies of the WEF. As evil as it was the idea that the elites were plotting to minimize the food intake and resource intake of the masses , it at least made dystopian sense.
But out current overlords have boxed themselves ( and us) in with foolish inconsistencies like off-shoring rare earth production and heavy manufacturing while building out data centers at a breakneck rate that need huge new power plants but the capabilities to produce them have been stripped bare by offshoring or by squandering them on subsidized fracking. On top of that they want more high tech weapons to fight wars but can’t produce them because they compete for scarce resources with other tech-bro pipe dreams.
It seems that the last 50 years of imperial prosperity and poor education has produced and elite class that can best be described as ” educated yet idiots”.
Back during WWII those in charge of managing the war effort and economy understood that even if the US raised huge amounts of money by selling war bonds they still had to contend with the availability of natural resources and thus instituted rationing of things like rubber and aluminum. Even during the 1970’s planners had more of a clue and when gas rationing went in to effect they exempted farmers.
Now everything that is done seems counterproductive and at odds with other things being done on a large scale.
I guess that is why we can’t rebuild until the rubble stops bouncing.
@Scotlyn (#235):
To dive very briefly back into the murky waters surrounding Eddy’s early life and the sources of her thought, some of the biographical accounts of her from people who knew her in her younger years describe a child and young woman who successfully used tantrums and similar displays of anger to bend her parents and relatives to her will, and later in life she seems at times to have been quite vindictive toward people who opposed her.
One particularly horrifying account tells how Eddy tried to set fire to the house of a woman who had evicted her from a room she had been renting in that house. When she moved out, she left her room locked and did not give back the key. When her landlady finally got into the room, she discovered that Eddy had left the closet full of shredded paper, with a lit candle in the midst to ignite the paper once it had burned down low enough. Fortunately for the landlady, the candle went out before it burned that low.
Of course, pro-Eddy biographers have challenged the accuracy of this and all other such testimonies, or passed over them in silence. Gillian Gill’s biography is much more balanced than any that were published before it, but not the last possible word.
All votes have again been tabulated; thank you.
Michael G, I’ll be devoting a post sometime soon to the pushback. I suspect it’s going to be the most important unexpected economic trend of the next two decades. As for present tense — ha! Yeah, being forced to talk solely about what LLMs can actually do — as opposed to handwaving about supposed future prospects — would leave AI groupies with very little to say.
Michael M, that’s a valid point. I’ve read that if all the data centers currently on the drawing board were to be built, the US would have to expand its electricity production to three times its current level. How? Nobody’s saying, as it’s obviously impossible. I think we may be seeing the final blowoff of the Age of Bubbles.
Vitranc, neither the Iranians nor the US want a genuine oil crisis — the Iranians want the income from oil sales, the US wants oil prices down. So we can expect plenty of kabuki theater until the media lose interest in Iran, after which the whole thing will doubtless be dropped by both sides. As for intensive vs. extensive farming, the issue here is the relative price of industrial feeds vs. agricultural real estate. One of the major shifts I expect to see in the years ahead, as population contraction sets in, is that farmland will become cheap while industrial products become more expensive. The end result, of course, is that all those authorities who are paid by the animal-feed industry to promote intensive farming will look like even bigger fools than they do now.
Cicada, it fascinates me that people have trouble understanding slow decline even though we’re living in the middle of it. If you were born after 1972, your entire life has been spent in a civilization in decline. Take the slow, ragged decline of standards of living, infrastructure, political culture, etc. you’ve seen over the last half century and just extrapolate it steadily forward. As for office fauna, got it in one.
Four Sided, good. Keep in mind that it’s going to be a slow, ragged change, not a sudden one, and that workarounds are already coming into being — farm stands, urban public markets, and much more. You’re certainly right that fermentation and other means of low-tech preservation are crucial — there are more reasons than one why I’ve made a point of getting good at making kimchi, for example! The first stage in the change, already under way in some areas, is the fading out of big supermarkets and their replacement by small stores akin to the neighborhood groceries of a century ago, with smaller frozen-food and refrigerator-case sections; next, the cold cases will be shored up by increasing insulation and the like; finally, they’ll be removed and stores will rely on canned and other room temperature storable goods (which will be coming from much closer).
James, excellent. Yes, and since the energy cost of system maintenance grows over time, sooner or later you reach the point where there’s no longer enough energy to maintain the current system and some parts of it have to be discarded. I wrote a paper on this more than twenty years ago:
https://ecosophia.net/civilizations-fall-theory-catabolic-collapse/
Scotlyn, I know of no way to use a “refresh cache” command. I’ll see if I can find one, though.
Bridge, all good points. I have no idea why US shopping malls, for example, don’t cover their roofs with solar farms.
DFC, the problem here again is that people were looking for some gimmick that would trigger the imaginary fast collapse, and the decline of net energy below some specific number was yet another of those gimmicks. In fact, as we’re seeing, what happens isn’t a sudden cliff but a flurry of adaptations that maintain some semblance of business as usual while allowing decline to continue. As for your comment about geopolitics, yes, that’s crucial, because how much energy anybody gets to use depends much more on the geopolitics of energy distribution than on raw geological factors.
Anon, we’ll see! Certainly they seem to be running blindly, full tilt, toward political/military collapse.
Siliconguy, quite a colorful sight:
Chad, I think we’re very near that point now, though it’ll vary by social class; a lot of wage class people, benefiting from recent economic changes, are likely to insist that there’s no problem at all, while I expect to see a lot of salary class people go whole hog into conspiracy theories and violent extremism.
Chuaquin, oh, it’s worse than that. Remember that price is always set at the margins. Once there’s a significant oversupply of real estate, the natural cost of most land will tend to move toward zero, and structures lose most or all of the fraction of their price that depends on scarcity. Since inflated real estate prices are most of what keeps the banking industry afloat, even a modest downturn in real estate prices will kick off cascading bankruptcies in the financial sector. So depopulation is a gun pointed at the temple of the current state of things; it’s not the end of industrial society, but it does mean the collapse of vast amounts of notional wealth and a transfer of influence away from financiers and back into the hands of entrepreneurs and business owners.
GlassHammer, and that explains the idiotic plans for data center expansion now sucking up capital in much of the industrial world, of course. It’s never occurred to the STEM types that limits actually matter. Unfortunately they, and we, are going to learn that the hard way.
Mithridates, thank you! I needed a good news story showing that the Davos set and other limousine environmentalists don’t actually believe their own hype, and this will certainly do.
Pure Land, and thank you for this. Interesting to watch another once-unmentionable idea creeping in from the fringes…
Catoctin, excellent! Just now, as summer swelters, that’s got to be a popular bit of knowledge.
Clay, that’s the barbarism of reflection again. Our current leadership — counting all parties and factions thereof — are so mired in abstractions that the hard realities of our predicament are literally unthinkable to them.
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Anselmo @245 says:
July 3, 2026 at 10:38 am
Bryan Allen #198 Atmospheric River Kick-scooters are dangerous.
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Why, yes they are! It’s Evolution In Action! 🤪
Riders wearing protective gear, as I mentioned in my original post, indicates that many riders are willing to accept the risks.
I get the same “dangerous” epithet applied to me when I ride one of our e-bikes, or mention riding them to a non-rider. Shrug. Check out the stats for pedestrian deaths due to motor vehicles in the USA (about 7,500/yr. right now.)
I will give what I hope will be a fairly realistic account of why I think there is some reason to be moderately techno-optimistic for the future. Let it be noted that I appreciate the reasons to believe the post-industrial world will look more victorian than sci-fi, and I also think there are reasons to believe such a world would be psychologically and socially healthier than the alternative.
Firstly, while I agree LLMs are unlikely to yield true consciousness or even “superintelligence”, whatever hopefuls mean by that, I still think it would be mistaken to undersell them. For one thing, frontier labs now seem to be at the point where they are able to use their current models to develop their next models more quickly. Each iteration of the model does indeed make fewer mistakes than the last. Take, for example, how earlier image models failed to produce accurate hands; current models quite consistently depict hands accurately. Many apparent mistakes and much of the “slop” floating around is a result of people using old models for cost reasons.
Now, if scaling is reaching diminishing return territory, as there is reason to believe it may be, and the current tech will not produce intelligences capable of independently inventing new tech or optimizing social coordination or whatever else ASI is hoped to do, where does that leave us? There is still a lot of juice left to be squeezed from modern models that has been neglected because the focus is on scaling. The primary reason for optimism, in my opinion, is in applications to biotechnology. Biology involves such a staggering volume of high resolution information that LLMs are almost uniquely and providentially suited to helping parse for less minutiae-tolerant human minds. As an example, high resolution genome and biochemical mapping can allow experimentation to happen at an exponential rate via digital simulation, much faster than cell cultivars or animal testing could. Promising applications can be sifted through much faster to find the actual gems.
Now, if you’ll allow me to exercise a bit more imagination here than many of our scientists have – biology is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than machinery is, and imaginative applications of it can replace many things we now rely on machinery for. Heating, cooling, and even housing, for example, can theoretically be solved with something like a genetically modified giant hollow fruit tree. Already we have found and started to cultivate microbes that break down plastic; might this same line of inquiry not result in a way to turn existing plastic waste into biofuel?
Plants already yield a wide variety of highly specialized and complex chemical byproducts from their simple alchemy of taking in sun, air, and water. Salicylic acid, for example, is a miracle drug in many ways. Penicillin and vitamin C are both usually distilled from mold. Theoretically, biomanufacturing is limited only by what raw atoms are available.
Truly, biology is the real “solar power” and in my opinion the key to getting any farther on the “kardashev scale.” It may be unlikely that LLMs will unlock “zero point energy” or whatever else; but it’s entirely possible that they help unlock several biological and ecological “technologies” that can keep humans thriving much better than our current industrial world does.
Secondly, I also think there is still more squeeze to be had from space industry – note I say “industry” rather than “exploration.” While it is certainly not something that we can rely on a free market producing, I think the subsidies being dumped into it are building up enough of an economy of scale for launches that catching and mining asteroids will become feasible, and that unlocks such a glut of metals that reduced input costs keep certain industries solvent even with increasing energy prices. And one of these industries will be renewable power sources.
Thirdly, there is some promise in robotics and automation. It seems to me that within the decade we will have a level of automation for various jobs where the lifetime energy input of a machine, between building it, running it, and maintaining it, will be less than the lifetime energy input of a human and especially of a human in modern luxury conditions where the cost of growing and shipping food, fueling a personal car, and moving water, gas, and electric through a house, all must be factored in. I view population decline as highly favorable for human thriving with all of these factors coming together.
I think the optimal future for human happiness is quite attainable: A smaller human population that lives longer, makes use of biotech and ecotech, and lives either a rural, robot-assisted agricultural life or a tight and orderly urban life reminiscent of the ancient city-state. If long distance travel is harder and slower we will all psychologically and socially benefit, and as long as starlink and solar panels are around there will be enough internet connectivity that there is a floor to what knowledge can be lost and forgotten. Local LLMs can even allow completely off-grid people to have an extremely valuable repository of knowledge.
Unfortunately, as has almost always historically been the case, our greatest obstacle is not technology but coordination. The longer we use price gouging and mass migration to maintain the postwar model, the less thermal and social capital we will have to execute the necessary pivots, and the more likely it becomes that change comes through violence and anarchy. But perhaps that was always the only way for things to happen and the end result will remain along the lines I have described.
@ Michael Gray #220
The problem with changing behavior because of cost — which can really work! — when the cost factor goes away, the behavior may change. After all, you don’t HAVE to scrimp and pinch anymore.
I remember Amy Dacyczyn in the Tightwad Gazette talking about changes in spending from people who’d lived through the Great Depression. For many people, penny-pinching became a permanent change.
That is, those people said “I’ll never go hungry or broke again.”
But! other people, when they recovered financially, said “Life is short and you only live once and I want that Alaskan cruise or that big new car.”
Change for ideology AND cost seems to last longer. You have a reason beyond money to do something or not do something.
JMG,
My suggestion for the Fifth Wednesday is the conjunction of Saturn and Neptune on the first degree of Aries, for the first time in 2500 years, approximately.
JMG et al,
I see fossil fuel supplies in this way and I appreciate how clearly–and succinctly you write about it all–but there’s something about the way (we) “Peak Oil” realists think about fossil fuel prices that doesn’t quite work. I can’t quite figure it out, but here’s the gist:
Before fossil fuels the “Labor Theory of Value” make sense, because before fossil fuels how much labor went into a product or service would have been the best predictor of its actual price.
Cheap fossil fuel in ever expanding supply so exponentially swamped actual human labor input that the “marginal revolution” makes sense. How much labor goes into a designer purse is not a good predictor of its market price. (Marxism as an economic theory doesn’t work for this reason.)
But I think in the future as energy sources and technologies offer less energy output for the effort at extraction (fracking is more intensive than the old Jed Clampet oil), we need something like an “energy theory of value.”
Newer energy systems–pipelines versus tankers, fracking versus drilling, LNG versus older natural gas–are more centrally controlled and more capital-intensive.
This means they don’t need to be cost effective in the broader sense of the whole economy. In the old system I could buy property and did a well next to yours to tap an oil field, but fracking fields are more capital intensive and harder to reach (and much harder to access legally because of the potential environmental dangers. In the old system I could buy a tanker to compete with your tanker. But I can’t run a pipeline to compete with your pipeline without immense government involvement. Firms don’t need to be subsidized by the government in obvious ways because central control and more capital-intensity means they basically have more monopoly power.
So as long as a company can make a profit from fracking, it doesn’t matter if it’s cost effective in an abstract sense. Fracking, nuclear power, wind, solar, and so on will be “profitable” even without subsidies because the higher costs will be inflated in the general economy like central bank policy-caused inflation or materials cost-inflation in a particular industry.
If that’s true, we will not see in the long descent any market feedback revealing the truth about energy costs. Ever. Like frogs in the proverbial boiling water increasing difficulties of getting energy will be externalized into the general economy, so before we run out of fossil fuels, people who have no access to the chokepoints where the energy is controlled will be too poor to access regular fossil fuels. Demand destruction and higher prices will make nuclear, wind, solar, and fracking profitable all the way down.
Or maybe not! Just an idea to toss out there.
@GlassHammer (#248): I’m curious if you’ve noticed a difference among engineer types in the attitude you describe. Because in a previous job, I noticed the mechanical engineers were very likely to be able to work with their hands and organize jobs logistically, but the electrical engineers often couldn’t even be trusted with their house’s electrical panel.
Lathechuck, thank you very the very useful data points. I ended up putting my Ac on 80 this morning and it’s still comfortable so far. I have a fan on of course. Temp is mid nineties outside. Based on what your saying, if it’s 80 and humid, I might want to turn the AC a couple degrees below that to avoid stuffiness. Got it. Also, my second floor has no AC because I think the furnace fan is on a low setting so i’m sleeping in well above 80 (don’t know what it is exactly). I don’t find this too much trouble with a fan and a thin sheet.
Right now in the west we are coasting along on the infrastructure built by our forebears. In California where I live the statewide water system and highway system we depend on was completed in the 1970’s. The high speed rail here was started in 2015 and six years later and 14 billions dollar still is far from finished. The hoped for finish date for the 494 mile run from San Francisco to Anaheim is 2040! The first transcontinental railroad in the USA, over 1900 miles long was built in 6 years 1863-1869.
An interesting analysis why adequate maintenance of our current infrastructure is likely not to happen.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/averting-collapse-is-no-longer-profitable
Dear Archdruid and readers:
I have found the next post that could be interesting for you, explaining the present war against Iran as an intent by Trump for to destroy the forces wich lead the globalism and that parasite the economy by the mean of maintain artificially high prizes for oíl
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2026-07-03/opera-aint-over-iii
An example of a working but denigrated technology- dowsing. Some anecdotes – The school I work at needed a second well and our administrator was told by the elected superintendent of the county office of education that the school is chartered through to get a dowser to locate the spot to drill. Which was done and successful.
At a conference I chit chatted with a teacher who worked at an older large complex. There were no maps of the locations of the water lines so the maintenance man would dowse for them as needed. As Shakespeare said “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”
@Chris at Fernglade
Up here in the Great White North, aka Nova Scotia, Canada, we get snow regularly in the winter. Once a snow storm is over and we get sun, or even a little brightness, I go out with a push broom on a long handle and clear the snow from the PV panels. Works like a charm. If it’s not too cold then the sun alone is enough to cause the snow to slide off the panels. I’ve been off-grid for 16 years have not regretted it for a minute. Mind you, it’s not a cost saving measure given the up front cost of the equipment. But on the plus side there is never a rate increase, and in those 16 years I’ve never had a power failure which is more than my neighbors can say..
adara9
” I’m curious if you’ve noticed a difference among engineer types”
The ones who have only engineered paper/emails or came from a design/test group are typically the hardest to work/plan anything with. The former barely understands anything more than one step removed from their own work/desk, the later doesn’t handle any barrier to the print/drawing they imagined into existence.
“In the UK they are turning farmland into fields full of solar panels. Just wondering what that will do to the farmland? How long before it can ever be used for crops or animals again?”
The solar panels themselves won’t hurt the soil. The possible problem is the foundations for the mounts. If they just pound a post in the ground then pull up the post and you are ready to plow. If they poured a concrete pier then you have to do some work to remove it, or just leave it and the field can be pasture or orchards. The piers would be just another rock. If they are tall enough the cows will consider them prime scratching posts.
On the energy cost of PV it depends on the mounts. The PV cells themselves pay back in about two years if you are in a good environment for solar. If you live here you have to correct for the three months there basically isn’t any sun. (7% of nameplate ruins the economics fast). The rest of the module adds another year. The mounts range from practically nothing if you have a south facing roof at the correct angle to a whole lot if you have to clear a forest and install dual axis trackers on sturdy foundations due to a windy area.
Then you get into battery questions which have to be part of the cost too.
Heliotroph, interesting. While I’m far from certain that you’re correct — in particular, there are sharp limits on the economics of launch to escape velocity that I think will be much harder to overcome than you believe, and the social inertia of existing models also militates against the direction of resources toward your ideas — you’ve done something here that puts you head, shouders, chest, and belly button ahead of most of what passes for thinking about the future: you’ve come up with a concept of future technology that isn’t simply a rehash of the present on a bigger scale, with a few technogimmicks thrown in for flavor. That tendency to rehash is one of the most pervasive bad habits that afflicts us, and goes back a long ways. Here’s a 19th century image of what life was supposed to be like in the year 2000…
Getting past that is crucial, since one thing history teaches us is that history is never linear and the future is always packed with surprises.
Jon, thank you, but I reserve astrological topics for my Patreon and SubscribeStar pages. Gotta pay the rent somehow!
Joel, that’s a valid point. In effect, monopoly power serves as a stealth subsidy. In most cases, it’s not the only subsidy — the rock-bottom interest rates that made the fracking boom possible are another stealth subsidy that has nothing to do with monopoly power — but it’s a significant one. Certainly the dispersal of costs through the whole of society is a factor I’ve been discussing for years.
BeardTree, have they yet laid a single foot of track for that high-speed train system?
Anselmo, yes, I saw that earlier. It’s a good example of the way that people are looking for scapegoats for high energy prices, instead of grappling with the realities of a finite planet. No doubt we’ll see much more of that as things proceed.
BeardTree, an excellent example. Dowsing works; nobody knows how or why, but it works. It plays a much wider role in contemporary life than most people realize. To cite only one example, when archeologists in Britain say that they found this or that subsurface feature by “probing with metal rods,” a line you’ll read in the journals quite often, that doesn’t mean somebody was hammering metal rods into the ground. It means this:
JMG,
I’m not sure if the following is a result of economic stress, adoption of retro technology, or what, but I have started seeing more and more kei trucks in my neck of the woods in western Massachusetts. A kei truck, pronounced “k-truck” is a Japanese light truck called keitora. They are no-frills pickup trucks that are only 5 feet wide, have small wheels and a 50 horsepower engine.
Here is the thing: you can import one, tariffs included, for $5,000-10,000. Yes it is small and too slow for interstate highway speeds. However the bed is the same size as a full-size US pickup such as a Ford F-150 or Chevy Silverado. The average price of a US pickup is well over $40K now, and many models are above $80K. The load capacity is of a kei truck is 350 kg (800 lbs). How often do you see anyone in the US hauling more than that? Almost never. It is only street legal if you import a 25+ year old model, so that’s what folks are doing. The engines are straightforward and you can work on them yourself.
Right now folks are importing 7-8 thousand a year, but the number is growing rapidly. Apparently they are popular with farmers because you can get 4 wheel drive models that fit through narrow pasture gates and wood lots much better than a regular pickup. I’m guessing Chris at Fernglade has been seeing these for a while but they are now picking up steam in the US. Curious if others are seeing them too. Anyway, a sign of the times.
“Nearly 60 major civil structures (viaducts, bridges, and underpasses) are complete, with more than 80 miles of contiguous concrete guideway finished and ready for track-laying” from Google. This is the first portion of the 171 mile long piece in the Central Valley
This is the high speed rail system so far in California after 6 years
The Empire State Building went up in 14 months, all designed, organized without a single computer, smart phone, calculator, or LLM Ditto for the few years needed to do the Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge.
At this point only people 60 and above have memories of the USA in its prime. Though I certainly do not say it was a perfect society, but there was a creative zest and life. As I often say – “I have reached the age where I have seen the future and I am not impressed”
JMG,
https://m.x.com/TheMaverickWS/status/2069428428064047175/photo/1?launch_app_store=true&ct=google-seo
On those data centers… you should get a kick out of the image above.
Link to the video it came from here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y1sdgBGzkUU
THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD
Bruno BL 162
As a kid, I partook of the classic storybook/folktale, “The Little Engine that Could,” where the theme is a train going UPhill. That would represent Part 1.
The book first got published in 1930, but there were earlier versions like 1906.
“I think I can, I think I can” became popular. In my head, ‘uphill’ signifies ‘the myth of progress.’ I am familiar with the 1954 version by George Hauman and Doris Holt Hauman.
Part 2 would be the story of a train going DOWNhill saying, “what could have been, what could have been.” ‘Downhill’ implies loss, failure, a long descent, and if the engineer isn’t careful and doesn’t brake astutely enough around a curve🛤️, it could lead the train to a very short and quick descent,— derailing off a bridge or cliff.
This downhill ride sounds like the wild ride that JMG talks about.
(You all joke about popcorn. As Jeff Dunham’s Achmed (the dead terrorist), would say, “Not funny‼️”)
💨🚂⛰️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi John Michael,
Yeah, close, but no cigar. And to say that things are a cigar, when they are otherwise, brings other statements the people have made into question – for no great benefit that I can ascertain. I happen to know of a passive house, and yes it does use minimal heating and cooling, but that’s not the same thing as no mechanical heating or cooling – which I’ve heard claimed (not by the people I know). I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a wood heater used. And the cost to get to that high standard… There are economic considerations with that story, which hint at diminishing returns. The future in relation to energy and stuff, looks a lot like that – economic realities.
It’s like here, I could spend an extraordinary amount of cash on getting the solar power system to 100% uptime. That would save the 20 gallons of fuel required each year for the generator, but the cost / benefit story is crazy. It makes no sense whatsoever. Easier to use less electricity and just pay for the fuel. I’ve had some people over the years say: ‘What are you going to do if you can’t buy the fuel?’ It is a fair question, to which the only reasonable answer is: ‘Mate. If I can’t buy fuel, I’ll be having some difficulties, but you’d be facing problems far worse!’
By the way, I’m not sure what your thoughts are, but I reckon if the currency blows up, or there is a debt default, energy supply per capita will take a sharp lurch downwards. A lot of this stuff is paid for by claims upon the future, and if that trick no longer becomes possible…
I see that the ‘three hours of free electricity per day’ offer on the grid was mentioned. That’s really all about trying to prevent what happened in Spain with the cascading grid failure, I’m guessing. Due to the cheap way that solar electronics appears to be connected up to the grid, I’m guessing that day the voltage rose too high on the household and business side of the grid circuits, and that tripped the sub stations which lead to further over supply down the line and so on. Like one of those domino tricks people used to do. Nothing much anyone could do about it. Plus it would have created frequency issues, at a guess. This is a risk on cold, widely sunny days in or around the summer solstice. Solar panels can produce past their named rating.
Man, I’d never thought that I’d get to the day when I’d recommend to people in areas with large numbers of solar panels to just turn their air conditioners on for the sake of grid stability. Low voltage issues are easier for the grid system to handle, than higher voltage.
And batteries on the grid… In peoples minds: Two days supply! in reality: Two hours. This hippy technology requires many days of storage in order to smooth out the peaks and troughs.
Interestingly, there is a lot of property for sale up around here, and am wondering about that. I recall that in the recession of the early 1990’s, contraction began at the edges with fire sales of say, holiday houses and luxury vehicles, although I’m sure other things were happening too. But there is also an element of the cost in that if two adults work full time to pay for the property, how are they going to maintain and put the land to use? Dunno.
Cheers
Chris
Hi samurai_47,
I actually own a kei car, the Suzuki Jimny four wheel drive. It’s a beast, and not sold in the US. It’s very light weight, economical, small and will go anywhere. There’s no carpets or soft surface, just 100% pure practicality. Not the best handling on the road, and is dwarfed by Rams, Silverado’s and Tundra’s. Last I checked, I don’t need to make up for a lack in other areas… 😉
Cheers
Chris
@ Peter Wilson #132. I too live in New Zealand (on its way to becoming New Zimbabwe if Maorifacation proceeds as per He PuaPua). I’d ike to discuss solar power with you via e-mail if that’s possible. catinthebox-at-protonmail.com.
Cheers mate…
Hi Atmospheric,
Thanks for the shout out and story! Respect.
Man, it’s high 90% humidity here for half the year during the colder parts. Tip things toward the wetter, and it’ll be rainforest before you know what’s going on. Around five inches of rain fell this week. It’s wet. Anyway, I prefer 68’F when sitting and doing work indoors during that cold time of the year.
Have to laugh, I’ve had people question the winter solar issues when there ain’t much you can do because sun is low in the sky and stuff. I turn the discussion back around on them. Turns out a lot of the time, they’re using extraordinary volumes of propane, butane or natural gas to heat. Crazy stuff. Down under extracts and exports a lot of gas. Locally however, the fields are in terminal decline and it’s expensive stuff. I’ve been weaning myself off that energy source for a few years now, due to the cost, and have it down to a 8.5kg BBQ bottle for every roughly 35 days. Fun fact: During the early phase of this current dust up in the middle east, two bottles only lasted 25 days. I suspect that they were being under filled due to lack of supply (there was a local refinery fire), but can’t prove anything other than my records. It pays sometimes to track this stuff.
Cheers and keep up the good work! A full DC system would work, but please do size the cables correctly for the higher current! 🙂
Chris
Luciano 164
> hydroelectric
Alongside canals are locks in the same vicinity as small hydroelectric dams. The dams create a modest amount of electricity for the local area. Lucky are those who reside in a town or small city next to a river that has a lock and small hydroelectric plant nearby.
Specifically, I am thinking of the city of Troy, Rensselaer County, New York, and points west along the Mohawk River (part of the Erie Canal).
Troy was on the route of my Grandpa Isaiah’s male line’s (and wife and multitudes of kids: mariner-canal, general store owner, and farmer, all along waterways between Montreal and New York City. Lake Champlain was relatively unique because its narrow boats had TWO power sources: wind (sailboat) and petroleum. Still do.
Secret clue: Troy is an environment JMG says has an advantageous future (during decline).
💨⛵️🦫💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi Siliconguy,
The canny person can purchase perfectly good second hand solar panels for very little coin. Sure, they may not have the original rating, but if it’s 90% of that, would anyone really notice?
I often find that the racking, stands, cables, fuses (oh my!) cost far more than the panels themselves.
Interestingly, the land of stuff appears to be dumping some pretty decent quality batteries at crazy prices. I have some doubts that it will ever get better than this moment in time for batteries. But could be wrong.
The winter sun is brutal isn’t it? I tend to point out to people, that if the plants aren’t growing, there isn’t all that much sun energy to capture. 25% of the rated output is about as low here as I’ve seen, and that is a day of very thick low cloud and rain, but I’m at 37’S latitude. Those days, err, happen! 🙂
Cheers
Chris
The Corduroy Bard 167
> what will happen when smartphones are no longer tenable
I am in the market for an Apple-based like-a-year-2000 ‘primitive’ flip-phone with only a handful of apps. Out of all the cockamamie apps I have on my cockamamie iPhone, I use maybe twenty. As it is, I keep the thing upstairs, out of the way, ringer off. I never give out the number and never answer it anyway. Someday I may take a sledgehammer and smash the iPhone to smithereens, but our sledgehammer is way too small to get much satisfaction out of destroying a small device.
I did recently smash to smithereens a Dynamo label printer which didn’t work right and I was past the month to return and the manufacturer does not give a flying f__k. The smallness of the sledgehammer s_cked, but after 40 whacks, the label printer was dead. No more throwing money at high-tech companies that, no matter what, are going under.
Just give me an old-tech cast-iron dutch-oven and campfire, and I am a happy-cat.
💨📵🥘⚒️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Samurai_47, thank you. For some reason my readers just now are giving me exactly the articles and info I need for future posts. Kei trucks are another sign of techological regression: people are saying “no thank you” to the latest thing and going for cheap, effective, lower-tech solutions. More on this as we proceed.
BeardTree, thanks for this.
GlassHammer, seriously funny. Whatever that guy’s smoking is pretty powerful stuff — is it my imagination, or does he have the same vacant expression as Joe Biden?
Chris, exactly. As economic limits bite, “perfect” gives way to “good enough.” Keep your eyes open for signs of contraction; the system’s under extreme strain.
Third time is a charm, internet flakiness in progress. Please delete preceding duplicate entries.
Kei trucks are very popular in the orchards, they fit nicely between the rows of trees, and cost less than a UTV.
As for hydroelectric dams getting silted in, what matters to the turbines is the elevation drop. The silt will reduce the storage capacity though, so your hydroelectric dam with storage becomes a run of river dam which is an intermittent power supply at least on a seasonal basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-of-the-river_hydroelectricity
Since I had the data anyway I did my quick renewable calculation for last January.
The average wind power for the month was 12.8% varying between zero (becalmed again) and 92.8% of nameplate.
For solar the average for them month (24 hour basis) was 8.6% varying between zero and 73.8% of nameplate.
@ Chris in Ferndale,
Yeah, I prefer 68’F in wet rainy winter weather too, the cold damp is hard on me, but what I prefer and what I get…. I do not live in a temperature controlled environment, in winter I may have 65-70’F for some of the day, I may wake up to a house closer to 50’F, I came home from a week away last February and the house was in the low 40’s and it was late and I was exhausted, It had even snowed while I was gone, not usual. I could not heat up the house before bed. I slept like I was camping even in socks and hat, it was fine in bed, but of course I prefer it not to be that cold. To me 5 inches of rain in a week in winter is a low amount for a rain storm, we get alot of rain here, but mostly just between November and April, so half the year. Our rain pattern during rainy season is clear cold weather ( the solar does decent when cold and clear skys, just shorter days of course), punctuated by routine warmer bouts of torrential downpours — Hence my name here on the blog. 70-105 inches a year would be normal we are low this year, but above full drought amounts.
It would make no sense to throw away and redo a set solar PV system at this house. And, no worries on wiring ever here, I am well aware of right sizing on details like that
JMG,
Anectodally relevant, after six months of unemployment mixed with odd jobs here and there, I have landed on a rather perfect job with critical infrastructure. The only catches are that the hours are long and it lasts just the six months the ground is thawed.
It used to be different with the company. Permanent hires and little work dyring winter. Now it is mostly seasonal workers. Costs cut where possible, it seems. But I am happy to have what I can have.
JMG
First I want to thank you for this space and your viewpoint of the gradual decline. I have followed your work for 20 years.
For awhile I wondered if I was the only person who thought that the gradual decline was the path we were on. Granted that growing up in the peak of the cold war and the beginning of the space age ( b 1940) there was always a strong bias towards both apocalypse and techno utopia. I remember hiding under our desks in air raid drills to protect ourselves from Soviet nuclear attack. I also remember Yuri Gregarin and John Glen. I forget the name of the first cosmodog, if it even had one. I always thought they could have sent two. It would be a pretty lonely end for a dog.
I confess I thought the decline might go a bit faster. I didn’t realize how much the financial shenanigans would enable fracking and other low EROI projects to extend the oil age. I wonder now what rabbits will be pulled out of what hats to counter the Hormuz closure, now partially opened, and the drawdown of strategic reserves.. Obviously it will impact different parts of the world to greater or lesser degrees. It will certainly lead to geostrategic realignments.
someone brought up the population decline’s affect on elder care. Who will wipe grandpa’s bottom. I am afraid in the current western, particularly US, model, either grandpa will get a new bottom in an ICU with a team of surgeons that will add 3 or 4 months to his life, or it will go unwiped. Of course several assisted living facilities could be built or home care or hospice provided for the cost of the ICU and surgeons, but the former is where the money is now. This will have to change as we progress down the decline slope. I suspect sooner or later there will be more assisted living, hospice, end of life low tech care, even more MAID, and less high tech, high energy medical intervention.
It just occurred to me that since my hip replacement, I may be part Chinese or Japanese or Israeli or Indian. I have no idea where the hip came from, or even if all the bits came from the same place. Lucky me. that luxury can’t go on forever.
As a footnote there is a lot more interest in late life situations as the boomers age than there was five or ten years ago. I have been in lots of discussions on the subject.
Stephen
I think that people have to learn to have different expectations and be more versatile to live in a lower energy world where things are intermittent. Like Chris says, it would be very expensive to make your ideal perfect needs/wants 365 days a year all day on solar or other non grid environments. I like to start on the other end as contemplate what my basic needs are and having a couple ways to meet those needs. For cooking, for example, I like to bake, but I dont need to if in a certain weather pattern time of year I dont have power for it, I can cook on top of a wood stove or on a single induction burner, something within my energy supply for that week. When you are in a household economy, you can do laundry or pump water uphill to a tank in the daytime when the sun is shining and you have direct Dc solar power. When there is no sun, you might do laundry by hand in the bathtub or bucket. You can have more varience in the household temperature and adjust what you wear, or just start to find it common to have 20 degree temperature fluctuations over the 24 hours, it is hard and expensive and brittle to try and keep internal temperature exactly 72’F all the time. You may have solar hot water for a full immersion bathing or showering experience, or if there is no sun, you may heat up a pot of water on the wood stove and have a sink bath.
There is a difference in baking in an electric oven indoors or a solar oven outside in the summer, the bread and the brownies may have a different consistency, but both are good, they are just different ( You cannot get a french bread crust in a Sun Oven, for example.) If I finagled a loaf in a dutch oven on top of the woodstove it would be a third varience, although I usually just pat it out to flat bread at that point. We cant keep transporting fresh foods refrigerated all over the world, so you have to actually eat local and seasonal and preserve some foods. ANd, when I was a child, food was about 1/3 of income, food is actually very cheap right now, being held down in price to make up for the fact that energy and housing are taking more of the income. Part of low food pricing is automation in the fields, some is much more imports, which push the impoverishment of farm workers offshore, and part is importation of people to be a lower wage subclass to do the food industry work ( meat packing) at below living wage. So some foods you might want to provide locally in community garden or backyard if you want berries or lettuce
I think it can be more expensive, money but mostly resources, as things power down for everyone to try and have a one consistent way, people need to get back to expecting seasonal differences in temperatures, foods, how they clean or have entertainment and possibly on how they can transport themselves ( some areas not able to get out during snow season or rainy due to bad roads, fine to bicycle in spring, but not as practical in most of the winter.
Just to add : someone mentioned aged care robots that are being developed in Chins. I can see that being a possibility in high tech assisted living facilities in China or Japan for awhile, but I don’t see it being very widely applicable or going very far down the decline slope.
My vote is for the topic – how to sort out natural magic from marketing drek
“Our entire economic system depends on growth, and growth depends ultimately on a growing population. Global population contraction bids fair to bring our entire economic system to its knees.”
Part three of an interesting series discussing this exact issue as it relates to China and other countries:
https://thesubwayphilosopher.substack.com/p/china-has-a-problem-iii
@ Chris #202
> The warmest room in the house was 17’C / 62’F in winter, and that’s great, but try sitting there doing desk work all day long in such conditions…
It’s chilly here this morning. I checked the temperature in my apartment. 62’F. No sweat. Two t-shirts, woolly jersey, scarf, beanie, fuzzy pajama pants, fur lined boots. I could sit here all day on the computer, and probably will with all the sport. Things will warm up this afternoon though, since I have a big window which catches the afternoon sun. No need for a heater, which I couldn’t afford anyway, what with the price of electricity these days.
My main problem is getting my sourdough bread dough to rise in a reasonable time. Putting it under the duvet with a hot water bottle at 125’F will do the trick in under two hours. Then there’s the kombucha tea scoby which goes dormant at these temperatures. Normally it needs two weeks to ferment, but I have to leave it for three or four weeks.
(Btw, I don’t have the caching problem anymore, I can see all the posts, but the preview of my comment awaiting moderation is gone. So I have no idea if the long, long comment I just wrote went through or was lost to the subnatural realm. Which would really suck.)
To all the commenters who proudly took their AC down a peg I can only say: Weicheier! 🤡 Here, in the land of the Energiewende, we proudly go without AC at all – yes, even in the hospitals. Patients bring their own towels to sweat into (https://newzs.de/2026/07/03/patienten-bringen-handtuecher-mit-um-in-den-therapiestuehlen-den-schweiss-aufzusaugen/ – btw, can we embed links in the comments? I know about as much html as I can carve into my thumbnail, but this is something I know how to do, just didn’t want to make the comment look awkward with nekkid code exposed).
It’s not because we’re morally superior, though our Greens like to pretend it is, it’s because because of the wretched Energiewende making electricity prohibitively expensive. I caved and bought a small fan with a water tank at ALDI, so that it can hit me with cool air instead of hot air, but mostly I suffered through the heat like everyone else. I keep telling myself this makes me more fit for the post-apocalypse, if I live long enough to be there when it happens.
I was born in 1973 and thus never knew a different world than that in decline. It never looked to be in decline to me, though. I only noticed a turn for the worse post-2015 when Merkel and her ilk began to flood my country with illegals. And I don’t have anything against strangers, or different cultures living here – did you know that we have the biggest Japanese expat community in…. all of Europe at least, maybe even world-wide? We have a lot of people from India, South America, all over the world, really, but the one community that is consistently making trouble here has one thing in common… I really don’t understand why our so-called elites thought that in order to solve our demographic and economic problems, they had to select for *that* group out of everyone else. But it looks as if the economic side of it is solving itself already anyway, ha.
Anyway, I also vote for practical skills for the next round of the descent, including technologies that have been neglected for ideological reasons; but I don’t think one post, brilliant as it may be, will cut it. JMG, you mentioned that the Dreamwidth blog has gotten a bit thin, which is why you started doing book reviews. How about a new series of posts over there on this topic, similar to the series you did on Radionics? We could cover a much wider range of aspects, for example how to navigate the awkward phase where the current system has become too dysfunctional to adequately service the population, but is still powerful enough to cripple any attempts to help oneself by means of bureaucracy, exorbitant pricing, surveillance technology, and enforcer personnel to keep you in line.
To use myself as an example of what I mean by that: I’m sure I spent most of my former lives as a peasant (no glamorous past life as a priestess in ancient Atlantis for me – if anything, I’m sure I was a peasant in Atlantis, too). I don’t have any memories, but I know how to do (and have done it, it’s not theoretical knowledge) almost anything to do with farming without having been shown, from cutting grass with a skythe, stacking hay, killing and preparing a chicken, to milking a cow (when I was around eight years old, they had installed a mock udder at our country fair, and the city people could try to ‘milk’ the water from the upper bucket into the lower bucket, to the great entertainment of the farmers. I sat down and ‘milked’ the whole thing in under a minute, and heard a comment from a farmer’s wife behind me, “See? Now *that’s* how it’s done!” I had never done this before, at least not in this life). – So, I could homestead, if I had to; and in this land of sky-high electricity bills, my electricity company cut my bill in half because I spent so little. So I’d also be comfortable with very little electricity, I’d only ask for enough to keep the fridge and the washing machine running (all those people in the comments mentioning ‘fridge and some lights’ must be men. Nobody ever thinks of including the washing machine in the list of indispensible things we need to keep running at all costs!)
BUT! In today’s Germany, there is no way in hell or heaven I could buy or even rent a house to set up my little post-apocalyptic/long-descent farm-slash-workshop. And at my age, I won’t be able to save up to do either. I live in an apartment complex, and the most I can do is to try and cultivate some strawberries on my tiny balcony. If the supermarkets flicker out, I’ll at least have dessert. I know how to knit, crochet, and sew, and am currently learning how to make shoes, but I couldn’t sell them to make a living, because the state would tax the daylights out of me. So… what to do?
JMG,
hmm I wonder about the opportunity to, well not promote, but show trough example ( as the Germans would say “vorleben” ) the opportunities of extensive farming. It would be a hard row to how, since right now one would have to find a crack in the system to somehow make oneself at least solvent in the crossfire of not being competitive to intensive methods and being targeted by those who profit from intensive methods should you succeed. And later transitioning to a steady state with some more active promotion.
In totally related news. Just yesterday I passed the exam and now enjoy full farmer status according to law.
I still remember from my early childhood that extensive farming methods were promoted as being resilient and a backbone of society. I also painfully remember the slow dieoff of family farms after the 90s when politics betrayed them. And the resulting abandonment of fields that are visible today.
@ BorealBear #233
> JMG is willing to give a fair hearing to the idea that the Industrial Revolution really could have changed the course of human history in a permanent way
I don’t know if JMG covered this, but I remember a remark by a scientist that every new technology leads to new scientific discoveries. Think of the microscope and the discovery of microscopic life, the submarine magnetometer and definitive proof of continental drift, all the discoveries enabled by the harnessing of electricity, the understanding of the solar system thanks to planetary probes, etc etc.
It has radically changed our ideas of the universe and how it works. I doubt we could ever go back to gods and monsters that need propitiating.
Yes, I expect neither an economic apocalypse nor Weimar-style hyperinflation – simply 7-10% inflation that grinds on, year after year.
It’s not all bad! I was recently at a kids’ piano recital, thinking to myself, “this is great, a buncha families gathered together for live music, nothing fancy and people get to know each other”. The loneliness epidemic will be cured.
On that note, as a father of teens, I third the suggestion for discussion of sustainable trades moving forward.
Some sundry replies:
@pygmycory
Congrats, I also cut my wasting-my-life-on-the-internet this year with gratifying results. I’ve managed to read a lot of books as a result, which didn’t do my wallet any favours but hey, I think having a personal or family library will be valuable heading into the future!
@moonwolf
“As cities become unsanitary” – yes, thanks for that, I find this is a very under-appreciated point by almost everyone.
In the Online Doomer Right, you’ll hear “avoid cities, they’re becoming violent no-go zones”. Actually, there is something to this although it’s less dramatic than advertised.
But I think the real reason cities will become low-status again is simply the health and sanitation concerns. Not just animal manure – has anyone realized that governments won’t be able to afford health inspectors?
As a Jane Austen fan it’s easy for me to see that country estates will become high-status again once they’re widely understood to be healthier.
@Cynthia
I caught myself thinking something like that. I thought, “well if there’s an apocalypse, at least I won’t have to worry about getting arrested while I do what I need to do.”
Ahem. I’m sure everyone on this blog is non-violent. Just a point on this, since we’re in the business of myth-busting: periods of social breakdown and anarachy are always fairly brief, followed by restoration of some sort of order, and the losers are *always* persecuted ex post facto if they can be identified by the new overlords.
People might think they can “get away with anything” – and they can, briefly! But ex post facto prosecution is a perennial thing; it happened after Yugoslavia; it happened after the English Civil War, where the signers of King Charles’ death warrant were tracked down 15 years later, Nazi-hunter style, some of them living in caves.
Tl;dr, be careful.
@samurari
Thanks. You’ve mentioned something I consider so obvious that I’m not even really interested in discussing it, which is the way that social norms around, well, practically everything, will unfold gradually.
I fully expect that as time rolls on and oil becomes ever-more expensive, we’ll see ever-wider adoption of vehicles somewhere between today’s automobile and a 4-wheeler. They might not be street-legal today but every year this will matter a little bit less until eventually everyone’s doing it.
Many, many things will be like this. This thread has been full of them. @Four sided circle touches on another one dear to my heart which is the food production. Yes, absolutely, we are in the early stages of a full-blown revolution in the way food is produced and bought and sold.
“Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come”, and so there will ultimately be nothing that can be done to arrest this transition no matter how much the grocery stores don’t like it or the govt tries to ban private milk sales or whatever. In my rural burg folk are already buying meat from each other informally (I know of people straight up trading meat chickens for beef with no middleman).
@JMG
“One of the major shifts I expect to see in the years ahead, as population contraction sets in, is that farmland will become cheap while industrial products become more expensive”
That’s very interesting, I need to think hard about that one. I’ve been under the impression that owning productive land will be a good hedge against inflation as well as a source of wealth once the fake economy unwinds, but maybe that’s not at odds with what you’ve said and both things can be true. I need to think about it.
@CHAD
Yes. This might be provocative and no offense is meant to folk of lesser financial means but as a renegade PMCer I’m already hearing rumblings about this; I agree with JMG, we’re already early into the five stages of grief with white-collar PMCers who feel they were “promised” an upper-middle-class lifestyle if only they did everything “right”, and they’re beginning to feel cheated.
You’re going to see a lot of rage and psychosis from this quarter going forward, as well as a brain-breaking inability to accept that the “inferior” classes (trades, business owners) are better set up for the future.
Good morning JMG, and happy 250th.
I saw the arrival of the Tall Ships into Sandy Hook Harbor and realized that knowledge of sailing technology is alive and well. When the day comes for sails, those ship builders will be quite valuable. But maybe this time, the pine trees of New Hampshire won’t be going to supply the British Navy.
For those of us in the USA – Happy Independence Day1
I’d like to vote for “the tangled emotional roots of apocalyptic belief”.
All this talk of peak oil, collapse, rocket stoves etc. is stirring deep feelings of nostalgia and longing in me, which is probably not very healthy. I’m not Christian, but the thought of everything I don’t like being “cleansed” away has emotional appeal (though i appreciate now that the real world doesn’t work that way).
Of things I dislike, I especially dislike that our planet is currently choked with 8+ billion of us, wastefully eating and burning our way through the biosphere. While I don’t wish death or harm on anyone, the falling birth rates can’t come quickly enough for me.
One thing putting a break on birth rates must be the declining standard of living these days, and a massive factor in that is the over-inflated cost of housing now. Which was essentially caused by the policies of lending banks since the late ’90s, lending more and more from x3 to x10 of a person’s income. I’ve been wracking my tiny brain trying to understand why they did that and ruin things for the next generation – but the comments here, and your replies, have clarified things. Of course it was a way of fostering the business model of expansion. How ironic for them that the end result is population decline and contraction.
I know the correction for all this will be painful. Part of me wants to see it happen, though.
After re-reading my post, I realise I’m wanting to have my cake and eat it. Cheaper housing and a falling birthrate! Not going to happen is it? Perhaps this is where the appeal of “collapse” comes from – it seems like a way of having both (but probably isn’t).
But also, a deep yearning in my soul for the “pristine” world that existed a few thousand years ago. (Also not going to happen).
Hmm yes, a post helping to unravel this would be welcome 🙂
@Bridge, JMG, if I may:
(a) Solar farms don’t destroy or poison the land underneath them. They’re made of steel structures embedded in the ground like fences, with solar panels mounted on top, and grass underneath. Half the sunlight still gets to the ground and most Australian solar farms have sheep grazing underneath the panels. Once the panels stop working, they can be removed and it will become a field with some steel sticking out.
(b) In Australia, our major shopping centres do have solar panels on top. Woolworths, one of our major grocery chains, is putting solar panels on top of all of its new buildings. One of the advantages of concrete box buildings is that adding solar panels on top is simple.
Michael G. # 220:
“To quote Vaclav Smil “If you want people to change, hit them were it hurts, their wallet!””
He’s right, in a cynical and pragmatical sense: I like his phrase…
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BorealBear # 233:
“The Ecotechnic Future is my favorite book by our host”
Indeed, it’s one of my favorite JMG books, though I’ve read it only in English (I think there isn’t any spanish translation yet). Not the best of him, but it deserves to be read, methink.
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Bogatyr # 236:
I think future isn’t wtitten yet. So Faustian predictions about wide spread robots use for peace and war tasks should be seen with a bit of prevention. We’ll see how fast or slow is the Long Descent, to allow or prevent these hi tech dreams to be filled in REAL future…For example, massive use of robots likely will need a heck of electric power, so do the math.
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DFC # 241:
“I think, also, that the geopolitics will have a tremendous impact in the future of the energy sources, potentially affecting the availability even more than the natural depletion.”
I agree, David. I tend to think, for example, that China has mud feet, but its rulers have been clever enough to delay some years (or even decades) in the future this mud feet begin to wreck its global hegemony plans. Especially due to be Russia allies (a country which has the main oil and gas wells outside the OPEC), their ties with Iran theocracy (casually an oil rich country), and evident Chinese diplomacy attempts (usually successful) to have economic agrees with Arab countries.
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Anselmo # 247:
I think kick-scooters are dangerous, especially thanks to their riders “death wish”, maybe unconscious (or consciuous?). They’re more reckless than usual bikers (ahem), according what I see in my town. Often they’re a danger not only for themselves, but for pedestrians (some of them love to run at full speed in sidewalsk), bikers and even car drivers…
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Mithridates # 249:
“EU court says private jet manufacturing can be labelled green investment”
This phrase is a source of wry irony for me, as an European…I hadn’t any respect for EU non democratically elected bureaucracy since some years ago, so I’m not puzzled by this hipocrysy sign.
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(To be continued).
@ Athaia #291 and @ Vitranc #292
As you point out, Athaia, we are at a time where systems are BOTH failing AND preventing people (as best they can) from implementing their own solutions… what to do?
I do think the key word here is what you say, Vitranc, about finding “cracks in the system”, because just now we will flourish best by doing as the weeds do… inserting themselves in all of the cracks, requiring very little maintenance, being stubbornly difficult to completely eradicate, and just keeping on doing our thing in the (we hope) increasingly overlooked edges and cracks of things…
Being married to a completely uncredentialled, but real, farmer **, what I see is that a small, family farm around here can never make a profit in financial terms, but, for us, its value lies in the way that it underwrites several layers of independence that we have from the larger systems, which (to botch an old phrase – both GIVE and TAKE AWAY financial benefits). There is an increasing drive in the EU to label, even microchip, every single living thing that walks, crawls or grows in the land, and farmers are being made into its spearhead through a CAP system that used to contain lots of carrot and a bit of stick, and increasingly is more stick and less carrot.
Unlike many of our neighbours we have kept our involvement with CAP, and other farm subsidy schemes, rather limited. We are enrolled in the main scheme, which effectively is a licence to farm, and because of which we have to fill in an annual sheep census, and etc. (This brings our household a net annual subsidy income of between 100 and 400 hours of work at minimum wage rates). We have avoided joining any of the multiple additional schemes which are now on offer – including organic farming schemes, ecological restoration schemes, and etc – mainly because each brings a small carrot’s worth of added income, and a larger and larger stick’s worth of added paperwork, surveillance, and regulatory oversight.
Somehow we have inserted ourselves into the crack that is a small farm, held debt free, mostly worked by hand, with the minimum necessary public oversight and regulation, providing us with a very little financial income, but quite a bit of protection against food shortages and food price hikes, while also allowing us to be part of a local gift economy which expands those protections further by strengthening our ties to local networks of semi-independent people.
I often contemplate dandelions (my favourite weed, or “volunteer”) as a personal example for these times. Be ubiquitous, deeply rooted, useful, and hard to eradicate, is the lesson I find there.
** 😉 – but nevertheless many. many congratulations, Vitranc! You are going in the right direction and well done! 🙂
JMG # 254:
“Since inflated real estate prices are most of what keeps the banking industry afloat, even a modest downturn in real estate prices will kick off cascading bankruptcies in the financial sector. So depopulation is a gun pointed at the temple of the current state of things”
Oops, it seems you’re right: I had forgotten every economic sector is related with some another ones, and housing is a big source of business (MONEY!) for banks, for example, thanks to mortgages…If real estates prices fall too much in the future, it’s near a death sentence for current banks “business as usual”. This current housing bubble era and in another countries won’t last forever…
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JMG # 268:
“Dowsing works; nobody knows how or why, but it works.”
Yes, it also works here. Indeed, scientificist “skeptics” efforts to stop every dowsers keep working in my country haven’t prevented this mysterious “art” has gone to be practiced. By the way, dowsers here are named as “zahoríes”, an Arab origin word (whose origin makes me to think it’s a very old art).
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Northwind # 277:
“Alongside canals are locks in the same vicinity as small hydroelectric dams. The dams create a modest amount of electricity for the local area.”
I can see a few small hydroelectric dams here in my town outskirts, where there’s an old canal, whose main use is agriculture. It’s interesting one of them uses the gap made by an old out of use lock for boats…
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Stephen P. # 284:
“I forget the name of the first cosmodog, if it even had one.”
Her name was “Laika”, and she died in space for the glory of Soviet Union…By the way, even a rock band here did a song as a tribute to the first human being (a dog) in orbit, during the ’80s.
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Athaia # 291:
“yes, even in the hospitals. Patients bring their own towels to sweat into”
Well, I see in Germany things aren’t so paradise-like as some people here still want to think (oh these complexed Spaniards….). And I myself have been complained for years about current decline in state funded hospitals thanks to neoliberal economic cuts…(ahem).
A happy Independence Day to all my fellow Americans, and a happy “What are those maniacs in the States up to now?” day to everyone else. 😉
Siliconguy, that immense gap between nameplate and actual production is the chasm into which quite a few green futures have tumbled. I don’t think they’ve hit bottom yet.
Oskari, glad to hear that you’ve got something. Now all you need is a side gig of the kind where you can build up a stock for sale during the winter months.
Stephen, I know the feeling! When I first started writing about the Long Descent, it felt like I was the only person in the world who noticed the obvious course we were on. As for who will wipe Grandpa’s bottom, I take a bleak amusement in the fact that this is becoming a big deal now that the Boomers are headed into nursing homes. I used to work as a nurses’ aide back in the late 1980s, just one more minimum wage job to pay the bills while writing books and stories that didn’t sell. Standards of care were frankly dismal, but the Boomers didn’t care. Now that their bottoms are on the line, on the other hand, the screaming begins.
Atmospheric, this is a crucial point. Even now, there’s no one right way for everybody — no matter how loudly this or that well-funded pressure group insists otherwise — but that will chug down a whole bottle of steroids as energy availability winds down. I had the great good fortune to discover quite some time ago that you can cook an astonishing number of things in a rice cooker, using less electricity than you’d need for one light bulb; that’ll help as electricity becomes more expensive, and once it becomes intermittent, I can segué to other technologies. As we proceed, the more options, the better.
Karalan, thanks for this.
Athaia, your long comment ended up in the digital doghouse, but the dogs were friendly and I let it out as soon as I got the fleas and dog hair off it. 😉 No, you can’t embed links, but you can put them in stark nekkid as you’ve done, and that’s preferable anyway so my readers have some idea what they’re going to be cuddling up to if they click on it. As for your suggestion, hmm! The challenge is that, like everyone else, I’ve specialized in the modest number of skills and retro technologies that suit my needs and my rather eccentric lifestyle; I could talk about those, but they won’t fit most people’s needs, and there’s a world of possibilities out there about which I know less than nothing. I’d like to do something along the lines you’ve suggested, though — any suggestions about ways to make it a little less self-focused?
Vitranc, congratulations, O certified farmer! (And I think about what people a couple of centuries ago, in your country or mine, would think of the idea that somebody needed a government certification to be a farmer…) I doubt it would be a good idea to take up extensive farming too publicly, since so many well-funded interests would have every reason to take you down. That said, if you can quietly build the necessary skills in a way that won’t attract attention, once energy costs head upwards again, the government may find reasons to start praising extensive farming again…
Martin (if I may), we never stopped believing in gods and monsters that need propitiation. We just give them different names now, and call them things like “justice” and “national interest.”
Bofur, delighted to hear it — and Brecken Kendall applauds from the imaginal realm. 😉
Jon, yes, we’re very lucky that sailing has remained popular enough that the skills haven’t completely fallen away — I doubt there are many people alive who have half the nautical skills of your average able bodied seaman in 1850, but a lot can be relearned fast by hard experience.
Kfish, your Aussie chain stores are a lot smarter than ours, then.
Happy Fourth of July to those who celebrate! (So, not the British.)
Regarding the Boomers, it’s been interesting to see how the American perception of elders has taken such a dramatic negative swing as they’ve settled into that role. I was rereading The Fourth Turning recently, and while it’s still a great book with a lot of useful information and historical analysis, I couldn’t help but chuckle when the authors predicted that the Boomers would be remembered best for their late-life role as a source of passionate, controlling leadership and spiritual guidance in a time of chaos. Goes to show that even the most well-thought-out theories about the future can’t predict everything…
As for my vote for the fifth Wednesday post, I would like to vote for a post on the reality, in a spiritual sense or otherwise, possessed by fictional characters. There have been posts here in the past about how you can make an object in your inner life, like a character in a book, take on what appears to be an inner life of its own, but I’m also thinking here of characters that seem to have their own reality outside the mind of any individual person — think Pepe, going from a cartoon character to a movement mascot for the 2016-era alt-right.
The subject of K-trucks has come up. My hometown has a July 4th car show every year. I just came back from taking a walk down there. The usual 60’s and 70’s muscle cars — and one guy with a K-truck. I had checked out a website called “japan trucks online” IIRC yesterday so I knew a little bit already. A 25 year old K-truck can be had for around 5K plus another 2K to be delivered to a US port. What the owner I spoke to said agreed with this exactly. His was nicely “cherry-d out” with modest custom wheels, a custom exhaust, new paint and upholstery. He said there’d never been any engine or drive train issues with it. But insurance was an issue. He said the only company that would insure it was “Flo’s” company, and that it wasn’t cheap due to the vehicle’s lack of safety features. I commented that “it might be the wave of the future — you never know,” and he didn’t disagree.
@JMG & Vitranc: JMG said “I doubt it would be a good idea to take up extensive farming too publicly, since so many well-funded interests would have every reason to take you down.” I’m a little surprised to hear that this kind of farming is frowned-upon, since the PMC folks surrounding me respond very favorably to certain words that I think of as (perhaps only potentially) going well with extensive farming, as for instance: natural, humane, grass-fed, regenerative, restorative, free-range, gentle, environmentally friendly, local, etc.
It’s very possible I’m misunderstanding, but I hope maybe this will be helpful.
JMG,
I think people should be cautioned at adopting technologies that seem to be adaptive and economical but for geopolitical and economic reasons are only short term stopgaps. A good example is e bikes or electric kick scooters. These are dependent on a massive, sophisticated and low cost supply chain in China and surrounding vessel countries. The batteries, tiny cheap motors and speed controllers are non repairable, have limited life and are not reproducible in our country at a price anyone can afford. When our economics change and we become a cheaper source of production one day, then they will be beyond us technology wise.
They can still be useful to navigate the challenges we face today but if you are a younger person you may want to consider what happens when the US defaults on its debt and can no longer purchase replacements ( or even parts) from overseas. While they are cheap, you could stock up on spare parts and replacements for the whole device to store away.
I personally ride regular bikes that I learned to build from scratch and how to repair them. I recognized that one of the biggest long term failure points for a human powered bike is the tires and tubes ,as we no longer make any of these in the US. So I stocked up on enough tires and tubes to last me for the rest of my life at a fairly low cost.
Re: Nursing homes:
From personal experience (not me but someone close to me), I can say that one can improve care for a loved one in a nursing home by frequent visits. I’m not sure that you need daily visits (although that was about how often I visited my friend), but I’m sure that weekly visits and more-than-occasional weekly visits will be enough to insure that the nurses pay more and closer attention to your loved one should that person need a nursing home.
@ Athaia
Yes ! I so agree about washing machines. I think at least the level of the wringer washer. Or, to at least have the wringer. The hardest part for me is the hand wringing out of clothes when they are washed in a tub indoors. I can agitate clothes in a bathtub with my feet. And, as I dont use a dryer, I hang up my laundry indoors all seasons, I cant have it drippy it would drip all over where I usually hang it. So then I have to hand wring and leave in the bathtub area until it has dripped out enough in winter.
I didnt mention clothes washing upthread as it doesnt have to be done daily, so is not an issue for temporary low or no power for part of a week or a week.
Out of doors washing all that drippy excess water is less of a mess, but still heavy and in winter, well, wet drippy would be so uncomfortable. I have a friend in my neighborhood who was a Vietnamese refugee after the fall of south vietnam and lived for mid childhood in a refugee camp, when I was talking about this to her, she says it is not as much of a problem, she of course was helping with the washing out of doors in a tropical warmer area. She says 2 ways she remembers are first, you put the wet clothing under a board and apply pressure, set up a leverage a pivot point even, or stand on it. For big sheets she says you get 2 people and each take an end stretched out and twist, or both take it and press or wrap it around a tree trunk. She laughs and says if we had an extended issue to that level of needing to do all washing by hand, she will help me with the large items that way.
A difficulty with modern washing machines and DC electricity is the water pumps I think, anyways, easier to convert a wringer washer that just needs its belt drive driven. That can be done mechanically by pedal power or other mechanical means or the motor should be able to be swapped to a universal motor that can be driven by a solar panel ? I think it should be able to havent heard of it done.
JMG (#254, #299, #303) Why not cover the roofs of shopping malls [or other sprawling commercial buildings] with solar panels? Well, there have been a few high-profile fires started by such installations! Just a few weeks ago (June 17), there was a major frozen-food warehouse in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, CA. The rooftop solar panels (and/or batteries) are suspected of starting the fire, and a dispute between the owners of the food, and the owners of the panels, has stalled recovery. Ask Google for more info on “solar panel fires”.
A solar farm surrounded by grazing sheep can catch fire without making the news, but when high-value merchandise is at risk, that changes the risk/reward ratio.
Athaia, I can well relate to what you wrote. I’m myself in Germany and of the same age as you, so I witnessed the decline, too. Especially the railway system has been hir hard by that decline, but other things, too, like administrative affairs, are getting completely dysfunctional.. It took quite a while for me to get all the details of getting Bürgergeld sorted out, and there were other problems, too. It will not be for much longer, because I’m getting a new job in early autumn. As for hospitals, at the times when I was in a hospital, it was well climated; maybe there are differences between hospitals in Germany in that regard. I, too, survived the hottest days of June without air conditioning. The highest temperatures measured then were 41,7 degrees Centigrade or 107,06 degrees Fahrenheit.
As for how immigration was and is handled in Germany, I really can’t imagine how that will end well, although I don’t have pat answers about scenarios.
A little off topic but pertinent to the day.
Imperfection and yes, hypocrisy, is inherent to the human condition. America the beautiful, the bad, the ugly, the true, the false and the good. Just like you and I. And I love this wonderful country. God bless the mess! Have ancestors that fought in the Revolution and am descended from cousins of John and Samuel Adams. I have a saying – “Who you are at your best is who you really are for that is who God intends you to be.”
Chris (#276): You should be able to tell if you’re getting the bottled heating gas that you’re paying for just by weighing the bottles. A simple beam balance with any “standard” weight that used to match the full bottle would reveal fraud.
I discovered that a major brand of denim jeans was cutting corners on the fabric quality by comparing the weight of my old and new jeans. If the old ones had been lighter, I’d write it off as fiber lost to wear. But they were still heavier than the new pair (with the same size and style), so I took the new pair back and bought a different brand. (I weighed them on a triple-beam laboratory balance from a yard sale, BTW.)
In the long run, we might need to plan to preserve standard weights and measures for the Long Descent. When the graduations were being scrubbed off of my Pyrex measuring cups by the dishwasher, I realized that I needed to put them into the “wash by hand” category, and to put paper towels between them when stacking them in the cabinet.
@Jon G (#296):
Yes, indeed! There are still several places here on the seacoast of New England where these old skills of manning ships under sail are still cherished and taught to interested people, including Mystic Seaport (mysticseaport.org).
A reasonably able-bodied young person could pick up the skills of a man before the mast in the course of less than a year at sea in the early 1800s: see Richard Henry Dana’s classic autobiographical Two Years before the Mast (1840). So there’s good hope for the future here.
And for keeping old-time New-England farming skills alive, Old Sturbridge Village (osv.org) is preeminent. We support their work by yearly donations.
Cicada Grove 223
> have a hard time grasping the concept of “long bumpy decline”
POEM “Jalopy”
Think:
dirt or gravel road,
with ruts, holes, and mud.
Or any combination thereof.
Heading downhill and slow-going.
My Grandfather Isaiah had a Ford Model T which did just fine on such roads. Otherwise known as jalopies.
💨🚙💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Re: nursing homes. Be very nice to the staff, and reasonable in all ways. Recall why your elder is there, and the many challenges faced – not easy work. Like much of the medical corporate scene, staff are often caught between family members wanting the moon, and shareholders wanting to cut every corner. Plus elders who are in poor shape, often with inaccurate recall. Get to know the staff as people, and appreciate they are the ones who know what is actually going on. Do not dodge calls or responsibilities.. The idea that putting them in a home relieves you of responsibility is false. Things progress and decisions will arise. For what it is worth – been there.
When in that phase, I was highly grateful to have chosen a locale very close to my home and work, with a local small business that had reasonable flexibility. This was improved because hands-on staff knew they could count on me to be there and back them up.
@Ethan L (#304):
Well, of course. Both authors of The Fourth Turning (William Strauss and Neil Howe) are themselves Boomers. ’nuff said . . .
Speaking of hand washing clothes. I believe in medieval times frequent washing was reserved for under wear or in Game of Thrones parlance small clothes. Outer wear was much less frequently washed.
Four Sided Circle 225
> canning
My mudder used to do home-canning.
Her and my relationship was fraught after she threw me (18months) across the room, because “I cried.” All I knew was I never trusted her after that; I loathed her forevermore but no-one knew why, even me. I was 40years before I recalled the event. She neither apologized nor sent me to therapy, but she herself became a drunk.
Hence, anything I might have learned from her, I avoided like the plague.
She knitted.
She crocheted.
She tatted (knotted).
She couldn’t teach me gardening because she herself had a black thumb.
Her sister and aunt and junior high school that taught me sewing.
One doesn’t have to do one’s own canning. One can BUY foodstuffs in cans. I buy canned vegetables now and then. In the USA, frozen foods came into vogue in the 1950s.
As you imply, frozen foods will go out of fashion in the 2030s,— a run of 80years.
My other grandfather (father’s father; born 1890s), Grandpa Clement, owned a small business cooling houses low-tech between 1910-1950: he created awnings for buildings in New York City. By 1955, customers wanted air conditioning, so he and the business retired together. He had gone to trade school (including machinist) and afterwards apprenticed in awnings, fashioning and sewing canvas. As an example of why someone should go the trade school, Clement had three or four employees, and made such a wonderful living (for forty years), such that he, wife, and three sons, slid through the 1930s Depression without knowing there was a depression (what depression?). Clement was by no means rich but from working hard, was honest, treated his customers well, he built four decades’ worth of repeat business. He owned a home, provided the necessities for his family, and gave them quite a few luxuries. My father (the eldest) was spoiled-rotten.
It is mainly hearing stories about Grandpa Clement that I got hooked on trade schools, apprenticeships, small businesses (< 5 people) and mom-and-pop businesses.
As for me, my mudder forced me into college prep(aratory), even though I had no aptitude for college. I would have rather apprenticed as a seamstress/dressmaker. Maybe in my next life.
Ever since not being schooled in a trade, the feeling of being adrift and lost never left me. In a way, there is a hole in my heart just from that. It was not right of my mudder causing my lifelong sadness. Take my advice, parents, don’t force your kids to go to college. Help them find “which niche” THEY ARE INTERESTED IN, in trade. For those who sit: bookkeeping, sewing, and weaving. Bookkeeping, in particular, is something ALL small businesses need; there is always a shortage. (And one gets to sit.) For those who stand, I have written earlier posts listing dozens of trade professions. And professions, they are.
My favorite is electrician partly because in these parts, now, the hourly rate for a reputable and skilled electrical contracting small business = $250/hour. One does need to know bookkeeping (or hire a bookkeeper) and small business and how not to get electrocuted (a third cousin in the 1920s got hi’self electrocuted apprenticing, dead at 19y). But there are dozens of other skilled trades—help yer loved one find the right trade‼️Seriously. Help out that way. Go visiting… (By the way, bookkeepers are not cheap.)
Five colleges later, I finally got a B.S. at 35years, but it didn’t do me a bit of good.
Back to canning. Canning is a great ‘way of life’ for one‘s family. Go for it‼️
💨🥫🫙💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
73y
Once again, all votes have been tabulated.
Ethan, as Robert M. noted, the authors of The Fourth Turning are themselves Boomers, and one of the most remarkable things about their generation is the messianic sense of self-importance that has gripped so many of its members, and a significant fraction of their immediate elders, since the days when they were capering around in “Daniel Boone”™ coonskin caps. If you know your way around the failed utopian literature of the last three quarters of a century you know this already: from Charles Reich’s The Greening of America through Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy all the way to Theodore Roszak’s The Making of an Elder Culture, there’s a whole literature of volumes insisting that the Boomers were going to bring about utopia on Earth just by existing, because they’re just so cool. Myself, as a trailing-edge Boomer who’s watched my generation cash in its ideals at far more than four turnings, I tend to think that the epitaph on the entire generation will be something like this:
Here Lie
THE BOOMERS
1945-2030
They Wasted So Much
They Accomplished So Little
Phutatorius, thanks for this. Yes, they probably are the wave of the future.
Adara9, oh, ordinary salary class people respond well to the words. Corporations and their tame bureaucrats, on the other hand, don’t respond well at all to anything that makes individuals less dependent on the system.
Clay, oh, granted. This is one of the reasons why my preferred transport technology is a pair of comfortable shoes.
Donald, I’m sorry to say that was my experience as well when I worked in the industry.
Lathechuck, so noted! I wasn’t aware of that. That raises interesting questions, though, about the habit of putting solar panels on residential roofs…
BeardTree, that’s correct. Smallclothes were washed very often, and bodies were kept clean by rubbing with a dry cloth — that’s surprisingly effective. I read, some time ago, one of those living history books by a woman who’d adopted an Elizabethan lifestyle for a year, and found that the dry cloth bath was as good as a shower, so long as you kept your smallclothes clean.
Bogatyr 236
> everywhere there’s an ageing population
Oh God. Just let a person die. Why won’t youngsters/younger just let ‘the old,’ ‘the disabled,’ die? What is so hard about that?
No ‘healthcare’ slop.
On an individual basis, the first event that, unattended, would cause death, just let the person die. No ambulances. No misery in hospitals. No cash-cows, greed, or industry based on keeping alive “the elderly,” much less “at all costs.”
💨😵🪦💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Cheers Chris At Fernglade!
I’m responding to your comment about it being only 62’F inside the house. Umm, actually, that’s very close to my preferred temperature. I live in a cool, maritime climate where any temperature above 70 is possibly record breaking, and highs are usually closer to 60. And I go outside a lot, and basically prefer to wear the same clothes whether I’m in or out. The first thing I do when I get to a hotel room is turn the thermostat down as low as it will go, usually 60 (although this seldom has the desired effect).
But I hear what you’re saying. The same temperature feels colder inside sitting than it does outside. I spent one winter here with no heat at all, and it was definitely chilly. Probably got down to more like 50’F inside. But it wasn’t too bad because, as you say, I spent a good deal of time during the day at work (heated). It was strange to come home and PUT ON clothes, rather than taking them off. But I have lots of camping gear. My couch was warm and I had a lap blanket for a few hours, and then I climb in bed with as many blankets as I want. Mornings were very cold, but I just needed to get dressed and go to work.
I also had a big advantage because our winter weather is either rain (overcast and wet, but usually not below 50F), or clear (frost at night, but sunny during the day). My house gets good passive solar, so even if inside could get down in the 40’s by dawn, if it was sunny, it’s would be back in the 50’s by late afternoon.
I did have one Get Out of Jail Free card, because I did have hot water and big clawfoot bathtub. Some nights are clear and frosty, and then the rain moves in before the sun can warm anything up. If I ever got just too cold, I cold take a nice hot bath and come out into my 50F living room naked, steaming, with a big smile on my face.
Anyway, from where I’m sitting, if you think 62’F is uncomfortable, you should try wearing some long underwear and a sweater. I’ve come to prefer that. You can always put on more layers, but if it’s really hot, you can only get so naked. And I like lots of pockets!
@JMG: “The challenge is that, like everyone else, I’ve specialized in the modest number of skills and retro technologies that suit my needs and my rather eccentric lifestyle; I could talk about those, but they won’t fit most people’s needs, and there’s a world of possibilities out there about which I know less than nothing. I’d like to do something along the lines you’ve suggested, though — any suggestions about ways to make it a little less self-focused?”
Well, I, for one, would be very interested in the idiosyncratic technologies of an eccentric arch-druid! And I can easily think of several things I’d love to read about. For one thing, appropriate technology – it may have been a think in Germany once, but when the 80’s hit (and everyone forgot about it), I was just entering puberty (I felt the shift from the 70’s to the 80’s vividly, and I *loathed* the new vibe!), so the first time I ever came across the concept was right here, reading your essays. And then, of course, all the fringe technologies that are decried as pseudo science – homeopathy has been mentioned, dowsing, I’m sure there are more. Steiner’s biodynamic agriculture stuff, and what’s that about earth pipes I saw mentioned on the Dreamwidth site now and again? The practical stuff – how *do* you build a bike from scratch (and have you heard of Russian dandelion that produces enough latex in its roots to be used as a substitute for the tropical rubber plant?)? And, as I mentioned, how do you start building your safety net on the side without the state diving down on you like a hawk? And if any of this is not familiar enough for you, maybe some Ecosophians could write guest posts?
Just wildly brainstorming here.
@Atmospheric River, I still yearn for my grandmother’s washing machine, a sturdy mechanical thing built in 1959 that ran without a hitch for over forty years. I was not in the country when my grandfather died (a few years after my grandma), so I wasn’t there when the relatives descended on his apartment and threw it out. I’m absolutely sure it would still run. If anyone knows how to build one of those vintage washing machines, I’d volunteer as an apprentice! I’m sure *that* would be a goldmine job during the slow descent. I’m hanging on to my own machine that does have an electronic menu (unfortunately), but at least isn’t hooked up anywhere by Bluetooth and other so-called ‘smart’ features.
Lathechuck 238
> We can keep six cows, instead of just one!
Many old cultures their currency was cows, including Ireland.
No pound sterling. No gold standard, but “cow standard.” USC Cow Dollar.
I hear tell that Indians from India still figure in terms of “cow as currency.“ Cow-rupees. No reason why not.
💨🐄🐮🥛💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@Robert Mathiesen,
Thanks for the link to Old Sturbridge Village. It’s only 90 minutes away!
Chauquin 242
> Maybe because governments (and elites) always need a good cannon fodder reserve for likely wars in a near future
What isn’t born, can’t die,— in wars. This is a good way to get revenge on elites: Simply don’t birth future cannon fodder.
World War One happened because, many industrial countries worldwide, there were a lot of excess males age 18-22 doing nothing constructive, inconveniencing their elders, just hanging around making trouble.
Twenty years later, same thing with World War Two.
💨💣💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi JMG and all the commenters of United States. Congratulations for the 250 birthday of your country!
I want to share with you the poem of JW Goethe to the Americans, I think it was for the 50 birthday of the Independence Declaration (around 1826), so two centuries ago:
America, you’ve got it better
Than our old continent.
Exult! You have no decaying castles
And no basalt.
Your heart is not troubled,
In lively pursuits,
By useless old remembrance
And empty disputes.
So use the present day with luck!
And when your child a poem writes,
Protect him, with his skill and pluck,
From tales of bandits, ghosts and knights.
Only you know if you follow the Goethe’s commandments or not.
Cheers
David
JMG,
“same vacant expression as Joe Biden”
That expression makes me think of those deadpan comics who would intentionally never emote no matter how absurd their bit was.
If I say “these leaders are doing a bit” it might be pretty close to the truth.
@Northwind Grandma (#319) wrote that her mother “threw me (18months) across the room, because ‘I cried’.”
I expect that sort of thing is far, far more common than anyone is ever going to be willing to acknowledge. Motherhood can be enormously challenging on its bad days–there are always bad days–and I think it’s something of a miracle that more babies aren’t killed by their mothers in infancy in moments of sheer rage.
When I was pre-verbal, my mother totally lost her self-control once when I cried at night, came to my crib, picked me up, and shook and shook me with all her might, yelling something at the top of her voice that I couldn’t understand (being too young for words), but clearly showed her deadly hatred of me at that moment.
When the memory of that night suddenly came crashing back to me one day, a couple of decades ago when I was in my 60s, it was a great shock. I was curious about it, so I mentioned it to her in our next phone call, and said that I actually sympathized more than a little, having raised children myself by then. Her response was simply a disgusted, “Oh, Robert, you remember everything!!!” I took that as confirmation of its accuracy.
Since I already had figured out long before then that she was a narcissistic sociopath, utterly incapable of loving anyone (not even herself), I wasn’t much put out by her response. (Our relationship had never been good, anyway, ever since I chose to marry a woman wholly unlike her in every way, whom she had disliked almost at first sight. )
The up-side to getting that old, old memory back was that it explained to me why, for years and years as a child, I had had horrific recurring nightmares of being killed in infancy by being put alive through a commercial meat-shredding machine, and alternatively, of trying to crawl alone in a onesie down a dark corridor between rows of monsters who were fixed to the wall on each side, and were trying to catch me with their prehensile tongues and eat me alive.
So . . . in a nutshell, if it matters to you, you are very far from alone is having had such an experience in infancy.
Donald Hargraves (#308) My parents’ experience was that if you volunteer services to a local hospital (such as fetching wheelchairs, and moving patients in them), when the time comes that you need care there, you’ll know the staff, they’ll know you, and they’ll treat you like family. And even if you get transferred to a better hospital, the staff that send you will also send your reputation.
My Dad popped popcorn once a week, for visitors and staff, for about 20 years. “The Popcorn Man” got all the care he could stand, and survived to age 87.
I exercise the ham radio backup communications equipment at a local hospital, about four times a year, as part of the Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES). At least, I know the director of emergency operations, and several routes to the hospital.
@JMG, in your response to Clay:
“so mired in abstractions that the hard realities of our predicament are literally unthinkable to them.”
Unfortunately, I think this is a lot more widespread than just the leadership and the elite. We’ve had it too easy for too long and watched too many movies to think that anything could really change. Stormtrooper Syndrome, I guess.
@Scotlyn; Thank you. The two of you continue to be a source of inspiration. One of the things I like to remember about my trip to GB is sitting at a picnic table behind the hotel with real Irish sheep farmers. How authentic it felt. Please give my warm regards to Francy.
Oh and another thing, there is apparently another baby on the way in our extended family and I plan on passing on your good labor support advice to the future father. 😉
@JMG: A couple of centuries ago?! Try two generations ago. And the word you are looking for is: “Aghast”.
( In times like these I am saddened, that there is an ocean between us. I would relish the chance to take you for a stroll along some country paths. The explanation would have some more teeth to it. )
I grew up in a region where up until the 90s people were building hay racks and every house had a garden and every village had its own local shop, bakery and butcher. If you were to walk those country paths now, what you would see is fields going to shrubs and pastures in advanced stages of ecological succession. The old-timers in my youth talked about decentralized supply lines in order to be resilient in the face of systemic shocks. They were taught this in schools.
Then the times changed. And the whole economic model made small farmers economically uncompetitive. Large distributors squeezed out the small shops and bakeries. And I still remember the former butcher talking to my grandfather: “I got a visit from the health inspection, the place of business that I ran got deemed unhygienic. It would cost me more then I make in 5 years to completely remodel the shop, so I took a job at the . Two years and I qualify for pension.”
The joke is, those large regional distributors have recently abandoned having butchers. They just import bulk prepackaged meet.
So yes, even the ww2 generation would be aghast to find out the fields are becoming wilderness and their descendants are living of imported and processed food from Africa and south America. Oh and doing it yourself is so regulated and priced out of existence that one cannot even try.
Oh and I visited the local county office 3 weeks ago for some legal business and got to talk to a nice lady facilitating farm real estate purchases. She was shocked to find out about the differences in legal entry. And said outright, that what I get is miles better then hat young farmers get in my old country, where in her own words: “They are priced out of the market.”
( After this nice stroll trough the country roads, we could take a turn to the north and walk towards a nice oak grove that you might find intriguing 😉 )
@adara9: Hmm a very good question to set off a contemplation. What I would point out is that PMC is by no means a unified group with a unified set of set in stone commandments. Firstly even in the best of times they are perfectly capable of fielding a wing of their entirely earnest members who spout such opinions, all the while a set of Bureaucrats are eliminating honest butchers in the name of New Hygiene Regulation. Or driving cooks to prison for cooking with wooden ladles, or financially penalizing orphans for loosing their parents. Yes I have witnessed all of the above. And at the worst of times even all of the above mentioned earnest PMC members who proclaim “nature = good & industrial = bad” will flip on a dime when conformity demands it. I shall point to the whole covid phenomena to demonstrate the flexibility of their convictions.
As to the expressions; Some of them might be very murky:
I shall leave it to our host to tackle the gargantuan task of entangling the meanings of the word “nature” as perceived by modern man. Sorry John 🙁
The expression humane, in my opinion, really needs to be discussed in the right setting. I recommend a nice BBQ after a day of working in a slaughterhouse. And I do mean the killing room. I’ll throw the word “gentle” into the mix for good measure.
But ‘I freely grant that local might be a very good start in the right direction.
That is to say a LOT gets left out.
I hand wash most of my laundry (for the big stuff I use my sister’s washing machine). I use 20 liter buckets with vertical sides so the water doesn’t splash out when you agitate the clothes. Afterwards I end up with three buckets of laundry water which I use to flush the toilet.
The big problem is the time. It takes a whole morning. It’s so much easier to toss the clothes in a machine and walk away. Plus the machine’s spin dryer removes much more water than you can hand wring, so clothes spend less time on the line getting dry.
When I was a child in the ’50s we had a laundry room and a washerwoman would come by once a week to assist with the washing. In those days it was common to see African women walking down the street with enormous bundles of laundry tied up in a sheet balanced on their heads.
I once asked my mother how they managed to balance those huge bundles on their heads. She replied it was because they had perfect posture.
Our first washing machine was a top loader with an agitator that swished backwards and forwards, and a mangle for wringing clothes out that frequently jammed. It was a terrifying thing that made a loud growling sound. Modern front loaders are so much better.
Happy 4th of July!
Chris at Fernglade, as usual you are ahead of the curve with your kei-jeep. The current issue of National Geographic shows the setup for one of their wildlife photographers in Africa–a heavily modified Suzuki Jimmy. By all accounts they are very study and tough. I would much rather have one of those than a Jeep or a Land Rover.
Heliotroph 256
> genetically modified giant hollow fruit tree
Consciously harming a living tree🌳?
Seriously? A living tree? Or a dead tree? You don’t say, but the implication is living.
You are advocating tree-abuse? Seriously?
Biological-abuse? Seriously?
Plant-torture? Seriously?
I mean, seriously? Really?
Seriously?
The god(s) would definitely have something damnable to say about that.
If you are referring to living trees, it is high on the list of 110% UNethical action. And perhaps EVIL.
What are you thinking?
This concept is way worse than animal testing.
This suggestion, literally and consciously abusing a living tree,— not taking into account the well-being of the tree?, is just plain gross. Vomit time🤮.
It is a horrible idea.
💨🌳🤮💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
For the curious, the author of the book JMG is referring to in his reply (#320) to BeardTree is almost certainly Ruth Goodman. Her books and BBC documentaries are great easy-reading and viewing that touch on the lives of regular folks and elites in England throughout the past 500 years up to the second world war (although it becomes thin on the ground after the Edwardian Era). The emphasis is on regular folks.
The series of documentaries, where Goodman and her two fellow presenters pretend to be farmers in England at different eras, that may or may not be available still on Youtube , starting with “Tales From the Green Valley” and progressing towards “Wartime Farm” are interesting viewing for those who are inclined. Her books are of more value, of course.
Happy Independence Day to my fellow Americans, and a Very Merry Un-Independence-Day to everyone else! (The Mad Hatter and March Hare will be round to help you celebrate shortly.)
@Dylan #199
I stand corrected! Thank you.
@Scotlyn #232
Ouch. I’m very sorry to hear that. A couple years ago I asked some Christian friends how they would feel if someone with very different beliefs (but sincere goodwill) said they would pray for them, and the general consensus was “I don’t care, not like I can stop them.” My sense is that this attitude may be changing rapidly as the Second Religosity ramps up.
@Chauquin #246
This touches on something else I’ve been thinking of: suppose the nuclear bros are right on two points: (1) that nuclear really has been held back by hippies and (2) France really is the runaway nuclear success they claim. It still doesn’t follow that nuclear power can scale up to power the whole world. In fact, the hippies’ interference may have had the effect of depressing the price of uranium enough to make France possible, and once the hippies die off, the price will hike high enough to be unaffordable for nearly everyone.
I grant you this is a lot of what-ifs, which is why I don’t call myself anti-nuclear, just skeptical. I want to see it actually scale up, and be profitable without massive subsidies, before I’ll believe it. Until then, I’ll plan on a very different sort of future.
Hi Slink,
What can I say, but I’m summer soft! 🙂 Thanks for the suggestion.
The temperatures here can range between a winter low of 28’F to a summer high of 114’F. This morning it continues to drizzle and is 41’F with 99% humidity. Pretty unpleasant out there.
The reality is that there are more trees here than have any right to be – the surrounding forests are virtually unmanaged, and the hardwood species all grow at a metre per year depending on rainfall. Multiply that three feet of growth by ten thousand trees, and the maths are solid. 🙂 It’d be OK to do nothing, except periodically big fires sweep through the forests, and everything dies, right down to sterilising the soil. Better to do something about it all beforehand, and so I can use firewood with a loose hand, but am unable by law to sell any excess. It’s all very strange, but I deal with the world as it is.
Cheers
Chris
Hey JMG
On the subject of alternative energy, a few people have mentioned that one of the long term consequences of the Strait of Hormuz blockade that Trump caused is that it has forced many countries to realise how vulnerable there dependency on foreign oil makes them, and has encouraged them to take renewable energy development more seriously. Do you wonder if maybe Trump expected this to happen?
I think that if he’s getting America out of the Empire business, something that would be necessary for that would be lessening the world’s dependence upon them to ensure oil gets transported to its allied countries. Both alternative energy and alternative arrangements for oil transport would be necessary for this to happen.
Hi Lathechuck,
Weighing the bottles is a fine suggestion, but not one which had occurred to me. It’d never even crossed my mind that the bottles would be short changed, and at first thought it was a fault in the system here, but no, it’s all back to where it was previously. And that’s a good point too, in my youth weighing machines were very much a thing, and they were also regulated devices and seen in shops everywhere. In these enlightened days, we’re told to ‘trust’ the label. 🙂
By the way, it is worth noting that butane, propane, and natural gas (methane) all have different calorific values. So you could swap one gas for another or mix the three, (methane requiring larger jets due to it’s lower energy by volume) and get the same, or similar-ish weight. A bit of sleight of hand there is possible.
Cheers
Chris
Hi samurai_47,
Yeah, the little machine is tough-as. It’s my third one of these. They’ve made them continuously since the 1970’s, although they were pretty rough in those days. Cars needn’t look like they do, and I reckon that there will be a market for a basic utilitarian vehicle which can be maintained by the owners. There is one such machine on the drawing board: Slate (vehicle). Nod to Lewis for bringing it to my attention. 🙂
Cheers
Chris
Hi Martin Back,
I have trouble getting loaves to rise in 63’F indoor temperatures (which it is now).
Tell ya a funny story, an old mate of mine used to work for an organic sourdough bakery, and he told me that they allegedly used to add bakers yeast to the loaves in winter to get them to rise. Just sayin… 🙂
Cheers
Chris
Hi Atmospheric,
Yeah, I hear you about that. And using electricity to bake takes quite a bit of juice. I know someone (an acquaintance) who ran one of those pyrolytic self cleaning ovens on an off grid system, and what a surprise, using electricity to heat the internals up to about 400 to 500°C shut down their inverter due to battery voltage drop. Not something I would have considered doing, but always worth a try!
You’d sprout moss in your part of the world if you sat in one place for too long what with all that rain! 🙂
Cheers
Chris
Athaia 291
> they had to select for *that* group
Give me a hint. I don’t have the faintest idea what group of which you are speaking.
Let’s play Charades…
Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?
Is it race, nationality, or religion?
JMG wants it to be fun🎠.
Starts with___.
Ends with___.
Contains letters___.
Without vowels_____.
💨🔡🎠💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I once read words by Charles Eisenstein to the effect that we already have the technologies and methods to have a healthy world with people’s real needs met. He calls them “technologies of reunion” IMO this would be possible even with the present world population. I have saying – the problem is not too many people but not enough love and wisdom. But I admit I am not holding my breath to see technologies implemented until there is no alternative. We have gone very far down an unwise road.
There is a website called “Open Source Low Tech” which has tutorials for developing technologies using basic recycled materials and simple tools:
https://opensourcelowtech.org/
Hi John Michael,
There’s heaps of signs of decline. The state goobermint recently announced that they’d reduce road maintenance. And also due to the dust up in the middle east, down under they’re using asphalt imported from the US and elsewhere, which is a different standard to the usual stuff. C240 instead of C170, I believe. Isn’t as good in the hot summers apparently.
What does this all mean in practical terms? They’re saving mad cash, by not repairing potholes. One of the wheels on my car (the Suzuki Swift – again not sold in the US, but an awesome vehicle a bit under 10 gallons will go 700km / 435 miles) buckled. Nice for them. Now, you’d imagine that a matching replacement wheel from the manufacturer would be cheap, but no. Even the wreckers were pricey, and with no guarantees (having arrived there by way of a car accident!) Given I have to go and see clients, appearances have to be maintained, so I ended forking out for four different matching wheels. And if one had broken, chances are the others were on their way to that state of being anyway.
One thing is for sure. If there is a wider economic collapse, I’ll look forward to being able to drop some appearances, because everyone will be doing that. I saw that play out in the recession of the early 1990’s. It’s kind of like a nice social levelling.
As for the whole bottom wiping thing, well that generation has to let go of some of the accumulated wealth, and one has to be thoughtful as to how they’ve treated other people, who may indeed get some control over their well being. The golden rule has a lot to recommend it. For the record, my lot, and my lady’s lot, spent everything and left nothin’, as you do even though they themselves had a leg up from the earlier generation. It happens.
You’d have experienced something quite powerful doing that work, at that level. Hmm.
Cheers
Chris
Vitranc 292
> Just yesterday I passed the exam and now enjoy full farmer👨🏼🌾status according to law.
Congratulations‼️
Awesome🥳.
May the muscle💪🏼be with you‼️
💨👨🏼🌾🥳💪🏼💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@Lathechuck and JMG,
The possibility of fires on rooftop residential solar has been increased by the latest high tech trend in solar. No longer do you hook up the 5 volt dc panels to long wires to batteries and inverters in a shed or garage ( 5 v dc is unlikely to cause a fire). But instead the latest solar panels come with small inverters built in to each panel. Thus each panel puts out 110 v ac which can be fed directly back in to the power lines to be metered by you utility.
The downside ( in addition to fires) is that if one of the compact inverters fails ( the most common failure item in most solar systems) you have to climb on the roof to replace it. Also each inverter is specialized to match a certain solar panel, so no do-it-yourself mix and match invertor banks possible. Like most fancy modern technology that is supposed to make things better and cheaper it makes repair more difficult and useful lifespan much shorter.
Heliotroph: Genetically modified giant hollow fruit trees? Might be better than church steeples for hiding cellular antennas! You have to actually pay the churches.
Well my mate & I live totally off the grid in the bush 7 kms at the end of a dirt road with cows on it. Our house is built mainly of recycled materials with 3 sides being totally glass doors & windows. No curtains. It was designed to face north so in the winter the sun comes into the house onto a concrete slab. I live in NSW Australia on the the rim of a volcano 1400m above sea level. Winters are cold & we occasionally get snow. However the winters are meant to be dry, clear & sunny.
We have 13 solar panels & have never had to use the generator – we live simply but do have a computer, special fridge & washing machine. Our cooking & heating is wood & we only use offcuts from the timber mill & wood from fallen trees (a common event).
The climate is changing though. The last few years have been constantly wet with many days of constant mist (made worst by being on the edge of the escapement). The last few years we’ve had over 3.5m of rain & no real summer. So our system isn’t working as well – it’s cold 1 degree this morning & now cloudy. If I’m lucky it may get to 10C. We don’t light the fire during the day as dry wood is scarce. So much wood stock piled but with the constant rain & mist getting it dry is a problem. Also my mate is 80 & I’m 73 so it’s hard work block busting wood. Our solution is to rug up & save the fire for early morning & evening.
We live comfortably on our pensions but we are stuck here as we could never afford to move with the way the cost of living has escalated or the housing crisis. We bought into a community & so have a secure home here. And nor would we like to live even in a small village again. Our nearest large town is 100km away. So we do run 2 second hand cars.
So we are looking at ways to make life easy for ourselves and recently bought an electric ride on mower (which the solar system handles easily). What took 2 days of hard work to mow now takes 2 hours. The wallabies also help keep the grass down. No need to mow in autumn or winter.
I could go on – composting & toilet system, water supply, etc.
My passion is herbs & weeds & how they can be used as food & medicine which I teach. So my vote is for tools & techniques which can be used as our society falls apart slowly. Herbalism is another one that is given a bad rap yet everyone, & I mean everyone, would benefit by learning the old traditional ways of healing. We are going to need them as the current medical system, which isn’t great anyway, falls apart.
Enough my fingers are icy & I need to move around to warm up.
Chauquin 302
> I can see a few small hydroelectric dams here in my town outskirts, where there’s an old canal, whose main use is agriculture. It’s interesting one of them uses the gap made by an old out of use lock for boats…
I tend to think that a river, a canal, a lock, and a small dam go together as a unit.
Several locks are in the vicinity of Troy, Rensselaer County, New York, each attached to a dam (small). The canals are adjacent to either the Mohawk River or the Hudson River, I forget which (where the Mohawk River meets the Hudson River estuary, there is a lot going on geographically, even historically, Revolutionary War.)
There are lots of locks around there, quite fascinating to visit. Usually locks show up on maps along rivers, also showing the access road(s). Locks are usually public.
My family treated locks as our own personal parks; interesting and usually quite private. Minimal people around. Nearby there is usually a swamp or marsh or bog; it is foggy or misty, atmospherically moody. A ghost could emerge any second. Wear high boots.
My brother and I used to take home cattails (cat tails). Cattails are a fun plant for kids. Visiting a lock was always a no-cost, fun outing as a day trip for us kids. Picnic’ing too. To this day, all someone needs to say is “cat tail,” and I smile:
Typha /ˈtaɪfə/ is a genus of about 30 species of monocotyledonous flowering plants in the family Typhaceae. These plants have a variety of common names, in British English bulrush or (mainly historically) reedmace, in American English cattail or punks, in Australia cumbungi or bulrush, in Canada bulrush or cattail, and in New Zealand raupō, bullrush, cattail, or reed.
💨🦆🛶🦦🎣💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
All votes have again been counted; thank you.
Athaia, hmm. I’ll consider it.
DFC, that sounds like Goethe! A fascinating cat, and one of the rare thinkers who could catch the trend of history as it happened — I’m thinking of his famous comment at the Battle of Valmy, which was of course dead on target. Thanks for this.
GlassHammer, I dunno. It looks like senile dementia to me.
Robert M, though I don’t remember it, I have some of the symptoms of shaken baby syndrome, and given my mother’s general character, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that happened. Yeah, it’s common.
Slink, of course! It’s a common mistake to think that decadence only happens to the elite classes. Not so — the barbarism of reflection can be found all the way along the social ladder.
Vitranc, so noted! Different parts of Europe suffered that doom at different rates. The walk along the country lane sounds very pleasant indeed.
Justin, good. Yes, that’s the author.
J.L.Mc12, that wouldn’t surprise me at all — and if it does happen, a lot of people will be much better off.
Anon, thanks for this.
Chris, that’s decline for you — one “temporary” cutback after another, one useful part after another becoming hard or impossible to get, while a smokescreen of rhetoric from talking heads covers the erosion of business as usual.
Clay, that’s stupid enough that I should have assumed people would do that…
Julie, I hope things keep working out well for you!
Atmospheric River 309
> at least have the wringer
Historically, a washing machine‘s wringer acquired the nickname: the “mangle” or “mangler” because so many 19th-century poor mothers did laundry, by necessity, with a toddler around (no babysitters/child minders).
The toddler thought the setup was a toy, where (s)he thought it would be great fun to stick his/her hand or arm between the rollers. The result was one less hand or arm,— a horrendous injury to a 24-month-old, newly-walking infant, and possibly causing death. In the late 1800s/early 1900s, this injury was “a thing.” In the 1960s, I saw that my Grandma Clement (born 1890s) had a wringer on her old washing machine.
I am quite sure there are still warnings (all over the place) when one purchases a wringer these days. This washing tool likely has warnings saying, “Do not operate in the presence of children,” for very good reason.
💨🧼💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hello JMG and everyone,
Happy Independence Day to all who call America home!
For the fifth Wednesday I vote for technologies that work, but were outcompeted.
Oil question… Is oil as a substance used in magic at all (excluding financial hokey-pokey)?
Lehman’s sells an American made laundry wringer.
https://www.lehmans.com/products/lehmans-best-hand-wringer
Pricey @ about US$200. plus shipping. I have never bought anything from Lehman’s I didn’t think was worth the money. That said, get your garden tools from Red Pig and Rogue Hoes.
About technologies that work, I am using one right now. It is called needle and thread, and you also need sharp scissors. Some sort of measuring devices help. The see through plastics are nice, but I prefer metal. I despise tape measures, use them only when I have to.
@ Julie,
Keep that wool blanket on your lap and the knit hat on. Please tell us more about the special washing machine you are using off grid ( and refrigerator) I am getting older, 65 now, and my previous wood storage shelter burned in the fire 6 years ago, I am finishing up a new shed to keep the firewood dry. It is 12×10 ft, so will hold more than 1 years wood, 2 in a pinch if I was to go easy on wood as you are now. Is there anyway you can get a shed or leanto built next dry season ? Dry wood is so important.
@ northwind
I am talking about the 20th century wringer washers which are much safer. No limbs can be lost, it would hurt. I havent set mine up as I have much much more pressing projects, but I have a 1950s one in the barn
The micro inverts on panels on the roof was a series of decisions with an unfortunate result, I dont like them. The early solar from back in the day was sending down DC at voltages of 12, 24 or 48V. The higher the voltage there is savings on wire size, same power in thinner wire, less line loss, it is more efficient. So my system 28 years ago had 12V panels wired in parallel in sets of 4 to get 48V. So far so good.
From what I have been told, it went something like this: they made innovations in charge controlles where they could handle much higher DC voltages, and they started making high voltage panels and sending down high voltage DC, I dont know how high, hundreds of volts I think. Then the fire departments and/or government agencies worried about the dangers of emergency workers inadvertantly being exposed to such high voltages when they thought the power was off at a house. They made rules mandating automatic shutoffs on the roof for systems that had DC voltages over 32V DC ( I know, right ? not even the old standard of 48V DC) WHile microinverters are not the only way, they are a very easy way to meet this new rule. I sometimes wonder if they manufacturers of microinverters had their lobby involved, not that there want a problem to address, but how the rules were drawn up. Alot of installers find them quicker and easier to install and AC can have smaller wire than DC for the same power. Alot of installers are all about doing things one way only, to not have to think much and have an easy plug and play solution that relatively unskilled workers can install for them, and there you go. I do still wonder about how this starts fires. Could be faulty installation contributing. Or poor products being manufactured that dont have good safe combiner boxes or such. Maybe someone here knows why this should happen
My small system sends down DC electric to the garage. There is a single inverter in there that converts to AC voltages and this inverter was made in California 28 years ago and I do trust it more than alot of the cheap imports
First of all, happy 4th of July to everyone – it’s still technically America’s 250th birthday as I write this. I had a chance to reflect on this country’s long an tumultuous run, about how our republic turned empire will be considered by future historians as synonymous with the age of oil. And then a thought occurred to me – America was here before oil, and will be here after it.
Oh, not the vast, sprawling empire we have now. But I saw, in the small backyard farm celebration I attended today, an echo of the wild, rowdy, robust people of the past, and a vision of what will survive. Small, local communities, living mostly off of their own labor. The grand cities will decay and fall, DC will become ruler over a small body of local states like the Papal states, but some essence of this civilization will remain, as Rome’s spirit remains to this very day. I don’t know what the future version of the catholic church the empire morphed into will be – perhaps some UN style council where the peoples of the continent can gather? But I know that even though this empire is on its decline, our lives can still be good and meaningful.
I would like to cast my vote for #85 Math Fletcher’s idea of could cross-pollinating Northwind Grandma’s Fifth Wednesday proposal about jobs (comment #40) with BeardTree’s Fifth Wednesday proposal (comment #4) about technologies. Something about what trades and tools will be useful in the short, medium, and long terms. For instance:
I do electrical work, and data centers are where the money is at right now. The tools and knowledge required for that is highly technical and knowledge of digital technology is critical. Yet still, knowing how to do math myself, old electrical rules of thumb for running wire and bending pipe, help me now. In 25 years, these data centers might be repurposed for something else once its clear that they aren’t worth the energy to deliver on something far short of the promised AI god. Maybe a future general could use them during unrest or invasion to coordinate lots of drones, using a fraction of the processing ability. If I stashed away a copy of the plans, my children could help scavenge/ repurpose these things for another use, taking lots of the copper out of unused sections. At this point a basic electrical tester will be critical to safely pull the thing apart. Years later, when the descendants of the general have become lords, electrician’s most useful skills would be turning alternators into wind turbines to generate a bit of power, keeping the lights on in the data center repurposed into a castle, charging the few remaining drones. A slide rule will be critical for the calculations for this. And finally, as the old motors and alternators break, being able to melt down the copper in the data center to make wire, and knowing how to hand wind them to make alternators and motors would be key. So basic knowledge of electromagnetic theory, diagrams of how the windings work… those should probably be carved into my house’s foundation somewhere. And the descendants of today’s electricians will be the stewards of the castle, the smiths of lightning.
Just a thought, of a look at what trades and tools will be useful over time as this country goes down into the long decline.
My vote would be for something about Origin/creation stories, legends, myths, commonalities–something about that.
We always read about apocolypses and end times, but I would love to get your take on the beginning times.
And for those who like the Gospel of Thomas (from Nag Hammadi, I think):
(18) The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us how our end will be.”
Jesus said, “Have you discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end? For where the beginning is, there will the end be. Blessed is he who will take his place in the beginning; he will know the end and will not experience death.
JMG/board: curious if any of you (who presumably at least somewhat believe in astrology, magic, and also the concrete world) have any thoughts about what is “reality”?
I remember talking to a devoted athiest and physicist friend who insisted that “metaphysics” is a complete misnomer because we don’t even know “physics”–so to talk about going beyond it is simply absurd.
I’m not sure I quite agree with that, but once you leave the firm world of materialism, where (and how…and why) do you draw a boundary between what “is” real and what isn’t?
I would like to contribute my own thoughts, but I don’t have any coherent ones–I just run myself into circles, except to believe that Descartes is clearly wrong–I am, and I happen to think; I am not surer if his causal relationship is correct, though
JMG et al
In the village in Mexico where I live half the year there are a lot of e bikes now as well as small motorcycles ( 90-150 cc range). Most of the e bikes are throttle operated and don’t need to be pedaled. There are even tiny ones that I see 8 or 9 year old kids driving, often with a younger child on the back I have seen a mother with an infant strapped to her chest riding down the street on her motorcycle quite fast looking at her phone. I guess my point, if I even have one, is that this is not scaling down from using cars, but scaling up from walking or riding a bike, a lot of it over the last 5 years or so.
Where I am on the central coast of California most of the rest of the year I also see a lot more e bikes, but again replacing bicycles, not cars, and used for recreation more than commuting..Even with bicycles, one sees mostly high end mountain bikes or road bikes, very few sturdy mid range bikes. A lot of the bikes are now so expensive that the owners are in constant fear of them being stolen.
Not quite sure how I see this playing out, but interesting times for sure.
Stephen
As an aside, for all of you who voted on technologies that work, out of interest (i hope) here is my favorite one that somehow never really made it big, but the sheer audacity of it just leaves me in wonder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_valve
I have no idea how Tesla got his ideas, but the world would be a much richer place if we had more of this guy (well, at least before he went nuts, anyway)
Bring up points like these, and extend them to other subsidy dumpsters such as photovoltaic farms and wind turbines, and the reaction is predictable: “But there has to be something!” That’s where you see the power of the mythic narrative of progress, the faith-based credo at the heart of our culture’s pseudosecular belief system. Rationally speaking, no, there doesn’t have to be another energy source to replace the ones we’ve splashed around so improvidently. To insist that the universe has to give us as much cheap energy as we happen to want, just because we want it, is to surrender to the mental habits of a spoiled two-year-old.
I would like to debate this point to some extent. I too say that “there has to be something”, but I don’t mean it literally–of course, there could be absolutely no alternative. But I think it is far more likely that there *is* an alternative source (likely many) that an arbitrarily advanced and intelligent civilization could have produced. That we chose not to pursue such a course is more a failing of short-sightedness and misplaced priorities, but I don’t think it is fair or really holds to categorically say that the only way to get high energy output is to subject hydrocarbons to high pressures for prolonged time periods. But it is sadly too late for us, I think, and this argument will turn out to be largely academic due to our insane waste.
As an aside, one of the most irritating things in the early 2000s was to hear the sloganeering anti-peak oil comments presented as serious intellectual arguments (“The stone age didn’t end because of lack of stones; the oil age won’t end from lack of oil”). I cannot for the life of me understand how people viewed this as a coherent argument
Athaia 323
> but at least isn’t hooked up anywhere by Bluetooth and other so-called ‘smart’ features.
Got that right.
Electronic backdoors are dangerous to leave open.
(1) The first danger:
Our credit union left a backdoor open on our bank accounts without letting us know ahead of time. Had we known, we would have said, NO, we do not give permission. Shut it off.
Idiotically, on the off-chance any bank customer desires to set up online banking, they let any Tom-Dick-and-Harry have access, so in three easy clicks, a stranger gets access to your bank account in its entirety. No sh_t. Go to your bank in person, and ask, “If I want online banking on such-and-such account, how would I go about doing it?” And then, “What prevents a stranger (not me) from doing the same thing on that very account?” I venture you will get some, “Umm, oh sh_t,” nearly silent cuss words. You just busted them. Then tell them you will never, ever want online banking on that account, so slam closed the backdoor, shutting that avenue of access to any and all of your accounts).
Jethro and I only found about this wide-open backdoor after some organization started taking money OUT OF ONE OF OUR ACCOUNTS. We caught it THAT day, but only by accident.
(2) The second danger:
Being we bought a fixer-upper 20-year old house, after 25 years, the garage door died and wouldn’t let our car out of the garage. We hightailed it to our favorite hardware store and ordered a new garage door and opener. (Ugh, what cost?) So, a week ago the garage door got installed. (Jethro is technology-bent so he says Yes to Everything (like a 4-year old) as long as it is new.)
It is a pretty nifty garage door open because it has a bright light 360º around so it lights up every spider-corner of the garage. (I am all for spotting spiders before they spot me. I am their favorite bite victim. Brown recluse once; I had a terrible time; hot-packed it for ten months and it finally healed. Necrosis is no fun.)
So, that evening I started reading the Owners’ Manual of the garage door opener. I see this whatever-technology-Wifi thing where the garage door is all of a sudden on the Internet. I also see it has a camera.
N to J: This here says the garage door has a video camera. Did you know that?
J: Yeah. I knew that.
N: Is it hooked up now? Who sees the films (aka videos)?
J: Oh, yeah, the camera is on and running, and the videos are on the Internet, at such and such URL.
N: [W H A T ‼️At which time, I go ballistic, screaming and yelling, tearing hair out.]
What? Are you nuts? [I rifle through some webpages.] It says here that garage door openers are easy to hack. And since it has a video camera for all to see, everyone in the world has the ability to see when OUR HOME IS EMPTY OR NOT. You know, burglars would be interest in that.
J: Oh. I never thought of it that way. [This from a man who supposedly has a high IQ, but not high enough to outsmart burglars!]
N: [I continue to rage the next hour.]
J: Okay. Okay. I can’t disconnect remotely. I have to get up on a ladder and push the button to OFF, which disconnects the garage door opener from the Internet and Wifi. [The next cool day, we both get out to the garage whereupon he climbs a ladder and turns the thing off.]
He presses a button, waits, and three dings sound.
J: The three dings means the garage door opener is no longer on the Internet.
N: Great. Now would you recess the video camera, hiding it?
J: I would rather keep the video camera in the down position. That way, get this, burglars will see the video camera down, and think they are being taped, so will go to some easier place to burgle.
N: Oh Jeez. Fine, leave the video camera down and not recessed.
————————
Having a garage door opener that has a video camera and, via Wifi, the films of which are on the Internet, is easily hacked, where the hackers know when the house is empty because the resident has just showed them on film when cars come and go in one’s garage.
One might as well leave all the doors and windows in your home unlocked, with a sign saying, “Whatever stuff I own is yours. It is no-charge if you will just take it away, leaving me with nothing. That is my idea of a high life. Thanks, burglar-guys.“
ethro had focused on that the garage door opener that on the Internet was a toy rather than a security risk. How cute, he said.
J: Now we can watch ourselves in the garage.
(J plays too many video games which have rotted his brain.)
N: What makes you think I have time to watch on film you or I in the garage. It feels like Big Brother. Eewww. That is creepy.
——
So folks, close those two backdoors that you may not know about. No-one will tell you unless you ask. Fraudsters are out there looking for “progresses’”vulnerabilities.
——
No, I do not want my refrigerator on the Internet. This is crazy.
No, I do not want my washer on the Internet. This is crazy.
No, I do not want my dryer on the Internet. This is crazy.
No, I do not want the Internet having to with anything about our cars. This is crazy.
No, I do not want my oven on the Internet. This is crazy.
Male engineers are no-good-niks havINF way too much time on their hands trying to rationalize their salaries trying to sucker female homemakers to accept the stupidest ever Internet slop hooking up one’s large appliances.
These people are nuts. I hope this category of sales(wo)men dies soon. They are low-life slime.
💨🏦🎥💸🤷🏽♀️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Bofur: Ok, ok! Hold the war crimes tribunal, I’m really quite a nice person. I’m a lot more likely to be done unto rather than to do unto! 🙂
@ Northwind Grandma
I never got my hand caught in the mangle, but one day at the garage while waiting for our car to be serviced I saw a mechanic sharpening a tool on the grindstone. The shower of sparks fascinated me so when he finished I walked over to the still-spinning grindstone and put my finger on it expecting to make a shower of sparks for myself. Cue loud screams and a flattened fingertip which fortunately grew out without leaving a mark.
Re cows as currency. This is still common in rural South Africa. But just as a crumpled and dirty dollar bill is worth the same as a crisp clean one fresh from the bank, so cow quality tends to get sacrificed for quantity so they might be less well fed and cared for as some people might consider desirable.
Incidentally, knowledge of genetics has advanced by leaps and bound since the industrial revolution and might be conserved for future generations.
I was working in a region of Namibia that was too arid for cattle so the local stock farmers kept goats. An agricultural extension officer I got to know told me the farmers had no knowledge of genetics and made no attempt to keep related goats apart in mating season. Consequently the herds were of poor quality because of inbreeding.
They didn’t believe him when he tried to explain the problem. The solution he hit on to improve their herds was he would drive around with a load of good stud animals in the back of his truck. Every time he saw a farmer herding his flock along the road he would stop and engage him in conversation. Then he’d pick out the worst animal in the flock and say it has just the characteristics he’s looking for in his breeding program, and doesn’t the farmer want to swap it for one of the animals on his truck? The farmer thinking this stupid white man knows nothing about goat quality of course will always agree.
Slithy#192 & Chuaquin
The french nuclear power plants suffer a non scheduled problem of severe corrosión in its primary circuits’pipes caused for the neutronic radiation.
Hi JMG and everyone,
In relation to the general topic of “The Long Descent”, it seems to me that falling life expectancy will be a feature of this. Thus, concerns about who will look after all the people in their 80s and 90s will be attenuated significantly, as there simply won’t be that many people around in those age groups.
Am I on the right track with this, or missing important elements?
@Chris at Fernglade:
Heh, yeah, I was just having a conversation about roads the other day.
I remember when my wife and I took a trip to Scotland, some years ago. Navigating around, you’d glance at the map and think “okay, it looks like about XYZ kilometers from A to B, should take about C hours or so.” Because you’re thinking in terms of North American highways. Turns out it took twice or thrice that.
I expect local distances to get a lot longer in coming decades as there’s no money for asphalt maintenance. It will start road by road, here and there. In fact, it’s already starting: “We decided to just let this one go back to gravel.”
I endorse this. MDGA! (Make Distances Great Again) You’ll see tighter-knit communities again.
Relatedly, campgrounds are full this year. I take my kids camping every year. There’s a campground I took them to in the summer of 2020 that was a ghost town that year, I guess owing to the (ahem) social climate of that year. I was going to take the kids there again this year and what did I find, but it’s full.
I’m given to understand that camping records have blown off the charts, and the reason is because people are opting to stay local rather than long summer trips. Very 1960s/70s-esque, really.
And that’s great! Get to know your neighbours!
Clay Dennis- #349 Just a technical note: The solar panels on my roof put out about 20V DC, which is immediately manipulated in a very complex way such that the 20 panels can be wired in series and always drive the DC/AC inverter with about 600V DC, regardless of shading of any particular panel. This allows each panel to be loaded for maximum power output, runs high voltage DC around the loop, and prevents the current from all panels passing through every panel (it goes through the power conditioner module). They’ve been up there for over 10 years, quietly supporting the neighborhood when the sun shines. In that time, one of the modules failed, but in such a way that the rest continued to work. High-voltage/low-current is more efficient, for a given wire size, than low-voltage/high-current, because power loss is equal to the square of the current times wire resistance. You can lower the resistance by making the wire thicker, but then it’s more expensive and harder to install.
I think the bigger risk with PV systems is the battery subsystem, so we don’t have one. We’ll just trade power to/from the grid, instead.
JMG
Yes, I have been mulling over potential side gigs for quite some time, but nothing clear has shown up. One also has to be cautious over here, as when you desire to draw some unemployment money, one can not at the same time show signs of enterpreneurialism, or the whole benefit might be at risk. The system, at least for now, is rather rigid.
Though oddly, I do not mind the seasonal quality of the work. I feel like I stand better chances against the uncertain future if I have more than one thing going. Ideally I would have one or two other kind of jobs during the winter months, even if I would get more scarce hours. In some sense I absolutely love the fact that I am not “stuck with this one job” no matter how pleasant it is in many ways. It can also be a trap. Now I am forced to look for various other options, even if I were to return to the seasonal gig next spring.
Oh well, an interesting ride this is, and in so many ways so much better than the dreary life in the office. So no regrets.
Northwind Grandma #344
I assume that Athaia means (some of) the various Muslim people that we have been “gifted”¹. My stereotypes said “Syrians and Afghans” but I figured I might confirm this with some real data. Sadly, I have not found any statistic on relative criminality of foreign demographics. Instead, I have taken the absolute number of criminal suspects of foreign nationalities² (limited to the ten nationalities with the highest absolute numbers, presumably not including dual citizens) in 2024 (the latest I could find) and calculated what percentage that is of the number of people of that nationality living in Germany in 2025³ (again, presumably not including dual citizens). Rounded to one decimal:
Syrians: 12.3% (114,889 of 936,285)
Afghans: 11% (49,427 of 449.780)
Iraqis: 9.1% (23,185 of 254065)
Serbs: 8.1% (22,072 of 271.285)
Romanians: 7.2% (65,041 of 903,770)
Bulgarians: 6.6% (27,940 of 421.895)
Turks: 6.1% (93,253 of 1,520,400)
Poles: 5.6% (47,771 of 839.660)
Ukrainians: 3.9% (55,669 of 1,409,565)
Italians: 3% (19,353 of 629.405)
As you can see, my guess that Syrians and Afghans are the most criminal demographic in Germany is correct. They are closely followed by Iraqis. All three numbers surprise me, I would’ve thought they’d be lower. I have no idea what’s up with Serbs. Romanians, it should be noted, also include gypsies who lived there and came here once Romania joined the EU.
For reference, there were 5.837.445 of criminal cases in 2024⁴. 41.8%⁵ were committed by foreigners, leaving 3,397,392.99 for Germans. The population of Germany is 83,467,117⁶, with 14,070,225⁷ foreigners. By my math, that means Germans (including naturalised citizens, presumably also those with dual citizenship) have a criminality rate of 4.9%, so we must commend Ukranians and Italians for beating us.
—David P.
[1] A real quote by a Green politician, Katrin Göring-Eckardt: “We’re suddenly being gifted new people.”
[2] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/2461/umfrage/nichtdeutsche-tatverdaechtige-nach-nationalitaet/
[3] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Migration-Integration/Tabellen/auslaendische-bevoelkerung-altersgruppen.html
[4] https://www.bka.de/DE/AktuelleInformationen/StatistikenLagebilder/PolizeilicheKriminalstatistik/PKS2024/Polizeiliche_Kriminalstatistik_2024/Polizeiliche_Kriminalstatistik_2024_node.html
[5] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/2460/umfrage/anteile-nichtdeutscher-verdaechtiger-bei-straftaten-zeitreihe/
[6] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland
[7] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Migration-Integration/Tabellen/auslaendische-bevoelkerung-altersgruppen.html
Northwind Grandma #344, addendum:
I just noticed that I was inconsistent in using points and commas for digit grouping (because German uses a decimal comma and periods for digit grouping), my apologies. In percentages, the point is a decimal point, everywhere else, it’s supposed to for grouping.
—David P.
@ Vitranc #332
He says hello back, and is delighted with your news. As you have already, no doubt, worked out, a family farm needs a farm family. 🙂
PS, if you will accept further advice from me, it is essential that you instill both familiarity with, and love for, the farm BEFORE you send your children to school (should you decide to do that) – if you would like them to come back to it when they are grown.
(PS – don’t ask us how we know this…)
And in that vein, you might enjoy this post: https://peasantpolis.substack.com/p/in-favor-of-child-labor
What is nightmarish is that as the above is occurring is how things are actually playing out is the doubling down on totalitarianism, surveillance cameras proliferating everywhere like the flock cameras and it’s replacements paid for by taxes no matter how much they get damaged, data centres frantically built everywhere to aggregate surveillance. Mandatory Digital ID and every other totalitarian measure at warpspeed.
Being debanked for dissent. And being persecuted for being too independent. So that on the long descent they can cut you off for disobedience. And using environmentalism to justify the above.
Thank you for your response, JMG.
Would you agree that we are in a financial bubble of historic proportions, and how do you think it will ultimately resolve? Hyperinflation? Deflationary Depression? Some complicated combination of the two? Something essentially different altogether?
Also, what do you see as the time scales involved?
It may be worth noting David Rogers’ Webb book The Great Taking in this regard. He has done research showing that the UCC codes around the world have been quietly altered effectively to eliminate individual ownership of most financial assets.
In the event of a debt-based financial collapse, other entities than the nominal owners have precedence in claiming these financial assets as collateral. This suggests that central bankers and those they serve are planning for a socially catastrophic deflationary debt collapse, involving theft on a scale that is historically unprecedented.
Here is the link to the book:
https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/1ee786fb-3c78-4903-9701-d614892d09d6/taking-feb24-screen2.pdf
@JMG (#353):
From what you’ve said about your mother in the past, it wouldn’t surprise me, either. Much sympathy!
vote appropriate tech of the future
Once again, all votes have been tabulated. Thank you!
Inna, I’ve never encountered a magical use for raw petroleum. Petroleum-based candles and kerosene are both used as raw materials for fire spells in hoodoo, but they don’t have specific magical properties — you dye and “dress” (coat with herbs and essential oils) the candles, and put things into the kerosene in a lamp, to have magical effects.
Mary, it’s been a while, but I used to order from Lehman’s now and then. The quality and service were both pretty good.
Paedrig, of course. America’s still a very young culture; its current political system will doubtless be transformed utterly over the centuries ahead — though there may well be somebody called “President” for a very long time to come, just as there was no shortage of Caesars (however mispronounced) in Europe for more than a millennium after Rome fell — but the culture’s young and robust and has some of its best centuries still ahead of it.
Alpha, I’d like to ask you to save the topic of the nature of reality for this month’s open post, which will go up on the morning of the 22nd. I ask commenters to keep their comments and questions more or less to the theme of the weekly post — in this case, peak oil — and save other topics for those regular open posts. Thank you!
Stephen, that doesn’t surprise me at all. I see Mexico as a rising power, beginning to take control of its own economic and political destiny, and as more of its ample potential for wealth stays in circulation within its own borders, more complex technologies can be expected. The question is purely which of those turn out to be sustainable as the world deindustrializes — and that question may have any number of unexpected answers.
Alpha, the argument you’ve offered here is one of that fascinating class of arguments that can’t be disproved but have no practical value. Sure, it’s always possible that there’s some other source of highly concentrated energy lying around that nobody’s gotten around to noticing yet; you can’t prove otherwise — but there’s no evidence to support the claim that such a source exists. What we do know is that highly concentrated energy resources in the part of the cosmos we can inspect directly are collected and concentrated by living organisms, and by them alone; we know that living organisms on the only planet that certainly has them use carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen as their main atomic building blocks; therefore it makes sense that the concentrated energy resources we have are all based on carbon (coal) and hydrocarbon (oil and natural gas) deposits.
Russell, life expectancy is a complex matter. Plenty of people in the Middle Ages lived into ripe old age, and remained robustly healthy at that age — here’s one famous example, Jean Parisot de Valette, grand master of the Knights of Malta during the great siege of 1565; he was pushing 70 at that time and fought hand to hand against the Turks.
The reason average life expectancy in earlier periods was so low is that a very large share (sometimes more than half) of the children born died by the age of 5; then there was another period of dieoff in the late teens, males dying in battle, females in their first pregnancy. If you made it past those, you had something close to modern life expectancy.
Oskari, in that case you can use the winter months to pick up skills that aren’t obvious side gigs but will stand you in good stead as things unravel!
Info, I expect to see a growing rift between those who remain within the narrowing limits of industrial society, subject to those pressures, and those who are forced out — or leave on their own — and make their lives outside it. At first that latter will be a fringe phenomenon, but not for long.
Denizen, properly speaking we’re in a bubble-of-bubbles, in which frantic inflation of the notional value of assets with equally frantic avoidance of price discovery is the only thing that’s keeping the economy from tipping over into permanent contraction. Neither hyperinflation nor deflationary depression will prevent that, as both are (flawed but real) forms of price discovery, and financial assets tend to lose value catastrophically in either case. (The implosion of the investment economy in the Great Depression is worth studying in this regard.) Government or corporate control of financial assets only makes sense if those assets are intended to retain their value, and that suggests that the future the central bankers have in mind is one of indefinite extend-and-pretend, in which financial assets can easily be frozen in order to stop panic selling.
Robert, thank you.
Chris at Ferndale 349
> One of the wheels on my car… buckled.
The metal part or the tire part?
What’s up with why vehicle tires must have air in them? Why not SOLID tire? (no punctures) Except for making a tire lighter in weight, how does air make a tire better? I don‘t understand why air is the default.
Bicycles too.
💨🛞🛻🚲🤷🏽♀️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I had another thought somewhere between the Independence Day Symphony rehearsals and now–well, several thoughts, but the others are for Magic Monday–on the births subject.
People who ARE having kids are the “wrong sort” of people, at least in the USA. They are either having kids for the financial boost “welfare queens”, or they are uncomfortably religious “extremists”. I’ve seen several articles over the last few years lamenting that in a hundred or five hundred years all Americans will be Amish, Mormon, and/or Traditional Catholic. (Sorry, Orthodox, Quiverfulls, I don’t know why you get skipped over!)
Probably why all the “family friendly” government proposals are aimed at the salary class: free daycare, extended maternity/paternity leave, etc. Things that are not used by the sorts of folks who are actually currently having large families. Deregulating the auto market to being back the station wagon of my childhood that could seat ten would be a great start. (Heck, I’d downsize from my van to a 1960s station wagon–no one in my childhood social circle bought new cars!–if I could find one.) Loosen up the laws about kids sharing bedrooms and more kids will show up. But all of that would encourage us wrong sorts to have children, as well as the right sorts, and so deregulating childrearing cannot be allowed. And the incentives on offer, from a math standpoint, do not outweigh the costs: financial, career, and social, to the middle-aged salary class woman who is opting out of having (more) children. (Cut her and her husband’s student loan balance by 50% per kid and you might just get a birth rate spike.)
> one “temporary” cutback after another, one useful part after another becoming hard or impossible to get
Advise from “Red Green Show 1991-2006”:
Handyman Corner
Handyman’s secret weapon:
Duct tape.
UTub “Red Green Show 1991-2006” (comedy; slapstick)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw99DfVWCn8WcPc6cvNqw5-8FE8u4Gum0
💨👨🏼🔧🩹💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@BoysMom – it was some years ago that I realized with an absolute start that the purpose of initiatives like subsidized childcare, mat leave, is not to raise the fertility rate (as I used to think) but to make sure women are still able to participate in the workforce while having 1.7 children. The people who promote these initiatives don’t care about “fertility rate”, they see it as an innate good for women to be working.
As for differential fertility, I’m unbelievably whitepilled about it. They released the Canadian statistics a few weeks ago: average fertility has fallen to the lowest-ever at 1.2 but conservative Protestant is holding steady at 3. The future belongs to my kids and I’m stoked about it.
Padraig 360
> the descendants of today’s electricians will be the stewards of the castle, the smiths of lightning
Wow. What you wrote here is a wonderful description of skills necessary to disassemble data centers. For the grandchildren, there is money in scavenging artefacial dis-intellijant, “misbegotten remains or scraps” of electronics structures. Can’t let an old data center go to waste.
So, electricians have a phenomenal future, bordering on miraculous? Electrician now, passed down, aristocracy-overlord later. Reputation: magician; it will seem like magic to the uninitiated. Like blacksmiths of old, this time with a different kind of workshop: electrical workshop and specialized tools,— valuable items passed down.
Sounds sublimely promising. If I were a 15-year old (male or female) now, I would ask, “Where do I sign up?” Find a master electrician to apprentice (unpaid/minimal pay assistant) for five years, and marry the electrician’s daughter.
💨⚡️💪🏼✏️🔩💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Russell Cook @ 370
I agree with you long term, but think there may well be another 20 or 30 years where aged care is a big issue, and may have to involve some challenging decisions. When the baby boomer generation has passed through the system, like the pig through the python and we are farther down the decline slope it should start to sort itself out more as you suggest.
Nortwind Grandma
In my teens in the 1950s one house in our town had the first automatic garage door opener /light turner oner any of us had ever seen. The button was on a post at the entrance to their driveway. We used to delight in going by in the middle of the night and pushing it
Stephen
Various notes from catching up on comments,
The Navy considered anything above 28 volts as high voltage due as below 28 volts it was very difficult to get electrocuted. They had long experience keeping the electricity separated from the seawater and found out what worked the hard way. In practical terms 48 volts isn’t likely to kill you either. Even 120 V usually doesn’t. I’ve been bit a few times and am still here, but if the stars align incorrectly 120 V can kill you.
As for undiscovered forms of concentrated energy, good luck. The Universe doesn’t favor them. Entropy rules and the current thinking in the end even the black holes will evaporate in 10^200 years or so. Nuclear fission is currently to most concentrated energy source we can actually control, and the uranium was built from tiny portions of the energy surplus of an exploding star or a neutron star merger.
E-scooters, I haven’t seen a kid on bicycle for years, they are zipping around on those electric scooters derived from the kick-scooters (not the Vespa type scooter). And by zipping I mean zipping. Some of them have certainly been hot-rodded. The need for speed is still around.
as for ” the future the central bankers have in mind is one of indefinite extend-and-pretend, in which financial assets can easily be frozen in order to stop panic selling.”
That started some time ago and is continuing,
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/private-equity-is-struggling-with-exits-even-as-the-ai-deal-boom-takes-over-wall-street-133536900.html
Why air in tires? The weight of the wheel becomes prohibitive both from the suspension design and from the gyroscopic effects. Also sidewall flex adds some cushioning to the ride at least on small bumps.
Why air in tires? (#382)
1) Much lighter than all-rubber tires.
2) Shock absorption. The air in tires allows for flexibility on the road, whereas an all-rubber tire would just bump up and down. This also affects the shock absorbers and the frame. This is more true for bicycles and mopeds, where the wheel does a lot more of the shock absorbing.
Russell Cook 370
> falling life expectancy
> who will look after all the people in their 80s and 90s … there simply won’t be that many people around in those age groups
I think this is true. As a family historian and amateur genealogist, having viewed tens of thousand census sheets of the 19th-century USA, Canada, and Britain, I occasionally saw a person age 70, like 7 out of every 100 people. Age 80, maybe 1/100. 90, 1/500. There were not that many of them.
Plus, almost universally, anyone >69 lived with an adult son or daughter and grandkids, likely doing chores until the day they died. That is the proper way to die: with one’s family, making oneself useful to the young ones.
Then, after 1945, in the USA, that changed. We have access to only the 1940 and 1950 censuses. But we know the story since 1960. Healthcare advances pretty much forced everyone into thinking that “long life” was a good thing. An out and out lie.
Draw the line at wiping one’s own bum; that is a handy measure. If one can wipe one’s own bum, turn left. If someone cannot wipe one’s own bum, turn right; it means one is decrepit, and do something about it.
Now, the thing is, most people don’t have the ability or interest in becoming aware that wiping one’s own bum is an important juncture in life. Humans are only human, so they will only change habits when they have to.
In the future, it will be a good thing when most Americans die natural deaths 70-75. I am odd-woman out at 73. All of this “keeping ‘the husk’ of a person alive at all costs” is preposterous. By husk, I mean, the ‘inside person’ is already gone.
A blank stare is a ‘dead giveaway,’ pun intended, although not required.
It is torture on everyone involved to keep a husk-zombie alive. The healthcare system not only accepts torture, but requires it. The healthcare system enables the suffering of all involved-parties having to keep a husk-zombie in a non-dead state. Just say, “No.”
Let the person die a natural death. It usually happens 70-75, and THAT ‘early’ is positive all-round. No heroic interventions. Youngers need to be able to focus on making a living, and that is getting harder. Hence, youngers don’t need to have a husk-zombie hanging around in the carnate world slowing them down.
In the 1800s America, people usually died by age 50. 1799 and earlier, deaths happened routinely by age 45. So 70-75 is actually fairly late.
To have lived as long as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson did, it is obvious they had superb constitutions. Part of their stories is half of children died by age 10, so the ones left, like them, had a higher probability of surviving into adulthood, and a handful of those into old age.
In a hundred years (2126) (similar to 1926), deaths will revert back to Americans dying natural deaths by age 50.
People who think that the American healthcare system itself has longevity are in dreamland. It is a flash in the pan. The healthcare industries’ sophisticated machineries of today cannot be kept up for long. By 2051, most of those machines will be carted to a recycler to have its parts dismantled.
Just last week, I went to my yearly consultation with my MD just to show I am alive and kicking. As I looked around the lobby and first rooms I encountered, I saw excess and laughable abundance everywhere.
For example, I counted how many chairs I saw, forty in one room, six in another room, four in another. Sixty chairs in all. Each chair cost the company US$500. That is US$30K. I doubt the organization has that kind of money anymore to be allotted to chairs.
Besides, almost all of the chairs were empty. The chairs were leftovers from a previous era. Legacy chairs. Such waste. I sort of recoiled.
And this is a relatively ‘rich’ healthcare organization in Wisconsin.
Yes, you are on the right track. Aging people will die younger. Aging chairs will become tattered, get thrown out, and probably not get replaced. Aging super-expensive medical machines will break and no parts available, and those will go to a recycler, and not be replaced.
One unit at a time, spread out over twenty years.
💨👨🏼🦼🏚️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Thank you, JMG. For how long yet do you think the central bankers will be able to pull off their game of extend-and-pretend? What sorts of events might cause them to lose control, and have to settle for a financial collapse that they can at least control to unfold in their own interest?
I do have to say that their success with that game for nearly the past 20 years is a combination of astonishing, baffling, disheartening – and, perhaps most of all, infuriating. Among other things, their perverted success is making the Peak Oil message a much tougher sell than it would otherwise be.
If you get a chance, do look at the book I cited by David Rogers Webb. He is an extremely successful finance professional who I think knows what he is talking about. (UCC, by the way, stands for a part of state and national legal codes governing commercial and financial transactions that is known as the “Universal Commercial Code.”)
For how long into the future can car batteries be manufactured before automakers are forced to go back to magnetos and hand cranks to start the car?
About declining demographics: I doubt that the women’s emancipation genie is going back in its’ bottle on North America at least. Availability of small arms, which we now have more than enough of, and the metal ones built to last several lifetimes is one reason. Another is the rigors of the North American climates. It is simply not in any way cost effective to keep half your population in seclusion on this continent.
I suspect all ideologies and factions are in for nasty shocks and surprises. The clueless PMC may be the first to have to radically change their lifestyles and ways of thinking and behaving, but I doubt the prospect is any better for willful stupidity of any kind or class.
In answer to who’s breeding (#383):
And what’s the one thing the Amish, Mormons, Traditional Catholics and Orthodox share? A society that loves and supports children (too many Quiverfulls are more acting on their own).
As for everyone else – once financial calculations enter the chat, unless we’re talking farming the pressure to cut down on children becomes strong.
As for “the wrong people to breed,” I’m more worried about the Tech Bastards busily spreading their seed to multiple women. Never mind that that has happened over millennia, they’re the last people I’d want propagating themselves around the world
Boysmon#383
In Spain ,the year of studies in University costs less than 2000 € but we have one of the lower fertility rates in the world. I think that this is because women prefer to have a professional life. And not are seduced by religious codes.
David P. 374
> we have been “gifted”
Thank you for taking time out to write your notes. I appreciate it.
I would say that the European Union effort is an abject failure.
I am part German-heritage, Lutheran ancestors having left Germany and environs about 1705, Palatine emigration, roughly aided by England, ending up in the Hudson River (estuary), New York State, USA. Those ancestors couldn’t stand the indiscriminate wars going on, essentially between German county overlords, as I understand it, between Lutherans and Roman Catholics. My ancestors ejected themselves, braving the Atlantic Ocean in tall ships. A hardy few survived and married New England, Dutch, and French Protestant colonists (13 Colonies).
Later waves of Germans, of Christian faiths, moved primarily to Wisconsin, the state I moved to six years ago. Wisconsin has, I think, the highest proportion German-heritage people in the USA. I really like that when I walk around, I blend in. In California, I stuck out like a sore thumb, one whitey among millions of browns. After thirty years in California, my anxiety grew to such a degree that I called it quits. I realized I need my own whitey tribe around me,— in a very real sense,— for bodily protection.
It is sad that the situation in Germany is so harrowing. No-win for anyone.
💨👱🏼♀️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I hope the wrong people are freaky and like to get it on and have lots of kids, if they want them. Its always scary when the right people try to decide who can have kids and who cant. But for those who seek control and power, eugenics springs eternal.
Song selection of the week for this post;
Meta-Goth by The Breeders
https://youtu.be/pJbaoLDJ8sk?is=PWJZHIp1fQbkHDyD
JMG # 320:
“Smallclothes were washed very often, and bodies were kept clean by rubbing with a dry cloth — that’s surprisingly effective.”
Well, especially in winter, I guess it was suicidal-like to have a cold water bath…and even aristocracy (who could afford wood enough to have an occasional hot water bath), had to order their serfs to get the wood, start a fire to heat the water and so on…It hadn’t to be worthwhile to do that work, unless in special times, with cold weather…
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Northwind G. # 326:
“What isn’t born, can’t die,— in wars. This is a good way to get revenge on elites: Simply don’t birth future cannon fodder.”
I’d like yo clarify my opinion. Governments still want big infantry armies…until robot soldiers will be cheaper than humans (never?), for fighting huge battles in the WW2 style. Indeed, at least the West since 1945 is repeating the last world war narrative, even when missiles and then drones have chnge in part the wars rules.
It’s interesting Russia and Ukraine have a low birthrate nowadays, but this demographical situation hasn’t prevented the two sides to go on the current war. However, it seems massive use of cannon foder in infantry attacks (especially from Kiev govt) have dwindled in last times: cannon fodder doesn’ta last forever. Ukrainian Army and the Russian one seems to prefer better drones, maybe due to get much more conscripts to the fronts?
In addition to this, I think a guerrilla-like war is likely without not too many soldiers, so this strategy wouldn’t be limited by lack of masses of soldiers like “bigger” wars.
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Slithy T. # 337:
” It still doesn’t follow that nuclear power can scale up to power the whole world. In fact, the hippies’ interference may have had the effect of depressing the price of uranium enough to make France possible, and once the hippies die off, the price will hike high enough to be unaffordable for nearly everyone.”
Your economical resoning seems bright, methink. I’ll take into consideration…
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Northwind G. # 352:
Thanks for your answer to my comment about canals and hydro power. I can also tell you there are a few canals here which were digged mainly for boats use, so they sometimes had gaps (and locks). Most of canals in Spain are used only for agriculture, so they usually haven’t any gap to harness its hydroelectric power, unless a few exceptions.
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Stephen P. #
“Most of the e bikes are throttle operated and don’t need to be pedaled.”
I had an ebike a time ago whose engine was turned on by pedaling. E bikes in my country must be pedaled to turn on their engine, according the law. So if you ride a two wheels vehicle without pedaling, you’re in a motorcycle…and you can be fined by cops (unless you’ve got driving license and motorbike plates. Indeed, a Latin migrant was stopped by local police in my town some days ago, because he rode a “bike” without pedaling at near 50 kmh…He faced a heavy fine.
————————————————————
(To be continued)
Anselmo # 369:
“The french nuclear power plants suffer a non scheduled problem of severe corrosión in its primary circuits’pipes caused for the neutronic radiation.”
thank you, I didn’t know this “small” fly in the (nuclear) French soup…I understand this problem means those pipes have a premature ageing…I think that nuclear power plants with that problem must be fixed as soon a possible, but I also guess all the repairings and or replacings won’t be cheap.
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Northwind # 382:
“What’s up with why vehicle tires must have air in them? Why not SOLID tire? (no punctures) Except for making a tire lighter in weight, how does air make a tire better?”
I can tell you solid tires are heavier than air tires, so motor vehicles and pedal bikes/trikes need more energy to run. In addition to this, tires with air inside allow a smoother driving/riding because air filling in tires is like a small “mattress”. Good luck with car suspension if its wheels are solid rubber!
Unsolicited advice of the week:
+ Be reliable
+ Avoid drama
+ Help other people win
+ Take care of your body
+ Take care of your mind
+ Live below your means
+ Treat your job as if it matters
+ Take care of your relationships
It seems to me this little list is applicable for applying the pressure of decelleration in any times, including tough times as seem to be coming.l down the pike.
BoysMom, the “wrong people” have always been having most of the children. I recall diatribes on that point from ancient Roman moralists. The “family friendly” proposals are just one more round of goodies thrown at the salary class, and won’t work any better than the equivalent legislation in ancient Rome did. Some things never change!
Northwind, permit me to fill your heart with dread. 😉 Duct tape is a fairly complex product — you can read all about how it’s made here — requiring a range of petroleum-product inputs, including polyethylene and synthetic rubber, and complex manufacturing gear and processes. Yes…there will come a time, and not necessarily too far in the future, when duct tape will no longer be affordable, and then later on will no longer be available at all. Welcome to the Long Descent!
Siliconguy, that’s why I described the situation as a bubble-of-bubbles. Private equity is losing air right now, and so other bubbles are being inflated as fast as possible to pick up the slack. Oh, and as for uranium, it doesn’t occur in nature in concentrations high enough to run a reactor. When I said that all concentrated energy resources depend on living things, I included in that the actions of human beings digging up rocks with much less than 1% uranium in them and extracting the uranium from it!
Denizen, they’ve been doing it for much more than 20 years. I consider the bubble game to have begun in the early 1980s as a series of moves on what was then a relatively modest scale, which were then intended to be temporary measures until the normal curve of rising prosperity took up the slack. That never happened — in an age of resource depletion, prosperity is no longer normal — and it’s not going to happen, but that simply meant that the political and financial authorities doubled down with all the resources at their disposal. It’s naive, to use no stronger word, to think that they’re going to let go, not least because if the economy unburdens itself of its superstructure of bubbles, the power and wealth of most of today’s powerful and wealthy people will dissolve like ice under a stream of boiling water.
There is literally no limit to the extent they will go to prevent that, and so waiting for the bubble economy to implode is a fool’s game. Individual bubbles may spin out of control, as the tech stock bubble did in 1999-2000 and the real estate bubble in 2008; the AI bubble is doing the same thing now, but it’s not going to bring about the general crash that so many people have been expecting, any more than those earlier examples did. Our current economy is mostly hallucinatory, and hallucinations don’t have to obey the law of gravity. Other factors will intervene long before that does. I’m quite sure, in fact, that the Dow will hit new heights the day before Manhattan finally loses electricity for good and a horde of neo-barbarians crosses the George Washington Bridge with plunder in mind. More on this as we proceed!
Oh, and I’m quite familiar with the UCC — my late wife was a bookkeeper. My take on the changes that Webb has discussed (and he’s quite correct to draw attention to them) is that they’re one more layer of duct tape propping up the bubble economy, allowing central banks to take control of financial assets en masse as needed to stop a deflating bubble in one sector to communicate itself to other sectors. What quicker way to prevent panic selling than to take “temporary” charge of the assets in question, value them at some arbitrary level, and hold? Again, it’s all about preventing price discovery…
Anon, ordinary auto batteries are remarkably low tech. To make them you need lead, which is an extremely common metal easily refined out of abundant deposits, and sulfuric acid, which was commonly manufactured by medieval alchemists using handblown glassware, charcoal heat, and a range of cheap abundant sulfur compounds. They don’t store much power — it literally takes one ton of conventional auto batteries to store as much energy as is in a single gallon of gasoline — but they’re cheap and sturdy. The kinds of batteries that can power an electric car, on the other hand, are much more resource-, energy-, and labor-intensive.
Mary, nobody’s talking about putting half the population into seclusion — do you seriously think that American women were in seclusion in, say, 1850? (If you do, I really recommend hitting the history books.) The issue, rather, is whether the rebuilding of the household economy and the end of arrangements such as commercial daycare and public schools will make it more economically viable for most women of childbearing age to work from home, and I think a case can be made that this is likely to occur.
Donald, aristocrats always do that. (Look up the droit de seigneur sometime.) The inevitable result is that you get a lot of intelligent, ambitious peasants resentful of the privileges of the aristocracy, and sooner or later those are the ones who end up leading mobs with torches and pitchforks.
Justin, and it’s all to the best that eugenics always fails. Every aristocracy — including ours — ends up inbred, coddled, fragile, and neurotic: the last people you want to dominate the genetics of the future, although of course they’re the last people to notice this. Good robust mongrel peasant stock makes for a much stronger and healthier society in the longer run. Your advice, by the way, seems good to me.
@ Stephen #284
I’m not a Boomer. I was born in 1968. So, I am getting old, and I do think about the fact that nobody lives forever more than I like. It seems that death is so hard here, now. It’s like they try to keep it from happening, even if that’s maybe not the right thing. I was always hoping that the “Boomers”, as they have changed so many cultural aspects, would figure this out before it’s my time. But I’m not seeing that. Yet?
Hi JMG and all,
Thoughts on musical instruments that will survive the Long Descent and also be good to have during it?
I’ve just started learning the harmonica, and it has various advantages such as: no need for tuning, portability, and relative simplicity. It’s also nice that you can start playing melodies pretty quickly. However, I think the production of the tuned reeds would lose viability fairly early on in the descent.
@JMG
“The reason average life expectancy in earlier periods was so low is that a very large share (sometimes more than half) of the children born died by the age of 5; then there was another period of dieoff in the late teens, males dying in battle, females in their first pregnancy. If you made it past those, you had something close to modern life expectancy.”
This is such an important correction, and it’s a source of constant annoyance to me that so many people misunderstand (or choose to misunderstand) this. Of course it’s also a favorite rhetorical weapon in the arsenal of many adherents of the Religion of Progress. It’s bad enough when they stick to the accurate version and bet that people won’t register that crucial little word “average”, but don’t get me started on the willfully stupid strawman version that jumps straight to “back in the Evil Past(TM), most people died at age 35!”.
@Alpha and Omega #365
“(“The stone age didn’t end because of lack of stones; the oil age won’t end from lack of oil”).”
Not that it matters to your argument, but I always find this one amusing since we have plenty of evidence of prehistoric people traveling long distances to find the right kind of stone. Sometimes there were even cases of what we might call “peak flint”, where people had to settle for lower-quality chert instead. So it’s not like a stone is a stone is a stone…
@Scotlyn #376
This quote from the start of the essay you shared resonated with me: “Like chickens, children want to work. They want to pull weight. They feel satisfied by knowing they’ve helped out, they’ve contributed to something, reached a goal.” Similar thoughts have been on my mind lately, in the different context of studying to become a teacher. I think this quote gives us a major piece of the puzzles as to why public schools are so often dysfunctional. By design they tend to be isolated from the “real world”, and kids are forced to spend years and years there while being subjected to arbitrary tasks that don’t let them contribute in any meaningful way to their societies. I sometimes half-jokingly say that even people in prison are allowed more meaningful economic contributions than schoolchildren.
So to bring things back around to the weekly topic, this might be one upside to the return of peak oil. There’s definitely a middle ground between the heartless way children were exploited as workers in the 19th and early 20th centuries and how they’re “protected” from any and all kind of meaningful work now out of good but IMO misguided intentions. Of course, Northwind Grandma’s enthusiasm for apprenticeships and more practical education also plays into this. With a few exceptions, most young people don’t get to start those and go in a more hands-on direction until age 16 in this country, which seems much too late to me.
Donald Hargraves @ 394: As for “the wrong people to breed,” I’m more worried about the Tech Bastards busily spreading their seed to multiple women.
And here I thought it was important to have Daddy in the home.
@JMG
Re: Uranuim
Some years back, I read of the discovery of a uranium deposit depleted of U-235 and scientists thought that billions of years ago (when the proportions of radioactive, fissionable U-235 was higher), conditions were right for a natural nuclear reactor to sustain a low degree of fission and use up most of the U-235.
Re: Inbreeding:
In The Coming Caesars, Riencourt thought that one of the main factors in the rise of a Spenglerian High Culture was the race mixing of people of an ossified civilization with barbarian blood. The mongrel population becomes capable of developing a new High Culture rather than repeating the old patterns and ways of thought.
I have birth and death dates of 19 male ancestors of mine stretching from a birth date of 1500 to a death date of 1864. The average life span was 70 with a low of 43 (the one born in 1500, his son lived to 65) and a high of 87 (1629-1716).
The genealogical information is taken from 2 different descent lines.
Hey Russell
I imagine that any instrument that was commonly played in pre-industrial times would be a good choice. Flutes, drums, guitars, and so on are likely to be eternally present for the foreseeable future.
Please put my vote for appropriate tech (or outcompeted, useful)
IMO, our medical system is already quite stressed, with a lenocratic function and price tag. Medication shortages have been increasing for a decade (though not usually the heavily marketed, often questionably useful ones). Corporate and tech owners, plus litigation and regulatory requirements, add many layers pre-anything testing and delays, to prop up profits, which end up delaying care while forcing patients to take more time off work. On the other hand insurers add yet more delays, sometimes sending off labs to other states (for a cheaper fee). Add more staff for both the providers (billing staff) and insurers (preauthorization contractors) to battle over payment denials. Patients and those who provide actual care are caught in the mess.
A look at the US problems in the early Covid days, and declines in Greek (monetary loss) and Cuban (fuel loss) systems are of interest. Cuban life expectancy and their entire healthcare system was quite good and low cost, until fuel deliveries were blocked.
Mr. Greer @ 401 .. in regards to your response to Justin about the aristocratic inbreds vs the lowly mongrel peasants genetics, I recall a short story by Frank Herbert titled ‘Seed Stock’ .. which, even though set in a far off world of incipient colonization, remains germane to your principle point that just because one is of elite breeding … it does not necessarily equate to having superior or robust genetic traits.
Hi John Michael,
I tend to agree with your analysis that economically we are facing a ‘whatever it takes’ mindset. Are you considering writing about that topic as part of this series?
Some of the recent tax changes down here, sold as being done to address inter generational inequality, and don’t get me started on additional red tape for small business being sold as an ‘easier’ process, actually have the effect of channelling additional funds, and more often, into the financial markets.
If I may add, people are naive about this stuff. It is difficult to ignore what is claimed, and takes a bit of effort to focus the mind instead on what are the actual consequences of these policies.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Thought you might be interested, but class issues are being actively discussed in the media down here: The economy is strong yet consumer sentiment is rock bottom.
I’d have to suggest that the mood is ugly, yeah.
Cheers
Chris
Russell, any instrument that was common and popular in 1800 will likely be common and popular in 2200. Here in the US, I’d give particular nods to the classic instruments of the Appalachian poor, the banjo and the mountain dulcimer, since both can be made very cheaply with hand tools.
Boreal, oh, granted. That’s one of the reasons I like to mention de Valette, since he was stronger and more fit at 70 than most people nowadays are at 50.
Patrick, yep — and that’s why we don’t have concentrated uranium deposits any more. As for Riencourt, he’s quite correct. Every high civilization in recorded history was founded by a mixed-race population.
BeardTree, that sounds about right. The fact that they became your ancestors shows that they made it past the two main death periods.
Gardener, our medical system is a pathetic failure that arguably hurts more people than it helps. I recall the last physician’s strike in the US, in California in the late 1970s. It came to a screeching halt when somebody noticed, and made public, the fact that the death rate dropped significantly as soon as the doctors went on strike.
Polecat, Herbert was one of the very few classic SF authors who understood ecology, and that’s one of the many stories of his where it shows.
Chris, of course I’ll be discussing that as we proceed. I’m delighted to hear that class issues are creeping back out of the forbidden zone where pundits have been trying to confine them all these years, btw.
open Christianity is returning to Britain via its immigrant / black population:
https://unherd.com/newsroom/christianity-has-made-a-return-to-the-world-cup/?edition=us
@ Samurai_47 RE : Kei trucks
Here in Australia, we had some heavy tarrifs on all import vehicles as we had a local industry. But that is gone now and we have been started seeing these Kei trucks available at very reasonable prices. One would hope, we would have a local industry that could make things like that but having cheap second hand vehicles is a decent alternative.
I don’t drive but I do like seeing this little putt-putt vans and trucks rolling around, they also tend to have larger trays and spaces than those giant land boats like RAM’s, GMC’s, and Ford.
@ Chris #407 “The economy is strong yet consumer sentiment is rock bottom.”
Talk to almost anyone who isn’t retired with a million dollars in the bank and that is a fairly common theme. I mean I’m pretty content but that’s because I took the core lessons of Diogenes and yes, JMG, to heart. I said it about a year back. In less than 10 years, unless Labor/Liberal can do some serious changes in the flow of money upwards, One Nation will be in power, it will most likely be PM Barnaby Joyce. I also suspect that they will do their own version of DOGE and that will get a lot of traction. In the US, 6.3% of workers have ties to the US government, in Australia it is over 14%. We have A LOT of fat to cut.
They are starting to take the threat seriously, with their changes to housing taxes and the cuts to NDIS, which while hard for some was always going to happen on the slope of decline. If they go in hard enough, there is a chance that they will learn the lesson.
@ BorealBear #404 RE : Life Expectancy.
There are many historians that absolutely hate the Victorians for pushing that narrative. But when people are being forced into some truly horrible conditions due to industrialization and exploitation, having a narrative of you living in the best times is a very powerful political tool.
Chuaquin @398
These e bikes have to be pedaled to start, but can then go by throttle if the battery is charged enough
JMG
I think sooner or later the power disparity between the US and Mexico will decrease or even reverse, but now Mexico is facing many of the same issues that most of the world is. Oil peaked several years ago and is now in gradual decline. Production is just a bit above consumption. Fortunately the high energy lifestyle is not yet as ingrained in society as in the rest of north America and the infrastructure of public transport and a simpler lifestyle still exists.
Drought is a major problem in most of the country at the moment, especially in the north. In Mexico City problems of water shortage, land subsidence, and the usual issues of decaying urban infrastructure and supply chains will combine to make the city uninhabitable at anything like its present population in the fairly near future. I doubt if cities of 20,000,000 people will be viable anywhere. in the world
. I suspect that the northern 1/3 of Mexico and the SW 1/4 of the US will continue to desertify and only be able to support a much smaller population creating a substantial buffer zone between the 2 countries and that the US’s imperial designs will be focused much more on Canada.
So in 50 or 100 years I can see Mexico as more of a power in a reshaped world, but as the Hungarian director whose Engliish name I forget used to say ” We’ll all have passed a lot of water by then”
Stephen
@Beardtree, JMG, and Justin re: Dry Cloth “Washing,” Smallclothes, and Smells, #318, #320, #336
At the risk of giving some fairly personal details, in the interest of helping other folks out.
Justin beat me to giving the more specific reference, but I figured I’d make a few points I’ve come across in reading about this stuff and experimenting with it myself. 1) It appears to be significant that the skin-touching clothes and the “dry wash” cloth (the cloth you rub your body down with) are linen. I dunno why and don’t have a theory, but it seems like cotton doesn’t do the job as well, and obviously synthetics won’t do crud. 2) From my own experimenting with trying not to nuke my own potentially helpful skin-surface microbiome, while living in a hot and sweaty place (as well as taking seriously such things as the Five Rites), the temperature of the water whenever you do bathe seems to be important. The cooler the water, the less of an impact if will have on how you smell (for better or worse). I take this to mean that cooler water leaves whatever micro-organisms are alive on you (good or bad) alone. Hot water will get rid of bad smells, but they tend to come back quickly if you’re at all active or sweaty due to weather (presumably because you killed the helpful microbes along with the bad). Soap has the same effect as hot water (gets rid of bad smells immediately, makes them come back more strongly after a day or two than if you had avoided it). There are various fancy “pro-biotic” care products, but I haven’t given those much of a try for cost/availability reasons. What I’ve roughly arrived at (for now, we’ll see), is that living in a humid sub-tropical zone with the social expectations I have, I can’t afford to go au naturale. When I’ve tried nothing but cool showers with pro-biotic supporting rinses/behaviors, I still end up stinky, except for maybe a day or two where everything seems to line up just right. To be fair, I’ve never tried for an extended-time linen-cloth wipe downs with linen-only skin-touching-clothes- maybe that really is the key (to get back to our original subject).
Instead, my current protocol is something like this: warm, but not very hot, water on most of my body, except for occasional hot baths for enjoyment. Mild soap (Dr. Bronner’s “Baby” Unscented Soap) for areas prone to smelling bad. Diluted Apple-Cider Vinegar, followed by natural conditioner (olive oil and honey) for the hair less often than I wash with soap (roughly once a weak, vs daily for the soap). Lukewarm to cold water only for hair and face. 1:1 Baking soda and corn starch as deodorant. So far, in the middle of a hot Texas summer, I haven’t noticed much in the way of smell, after struggling with getting the exact right mix for the past few years. To be fair, I wear linen shirts whenever possible, avoid synthetic fibers in general, and am self-judging (maybe I actually stink and don’t know it). All of which is to say, if I followed Ruth Goodman’s advice and wore nothing but linen and vigorously rubbed myself down with linen (not cotton!) cloths, maybe I’d smell even better for less effort!
Cheers,
Jeff
@JMG #381 in response to Russell re: Life Expectancy
Thank you for making this point! Since learning this particular bugaboo of statistical reasoning, it’s been one of my hobby-horses. Yeah, okay, there are some end-of-life conditions we’ve gotten better at dealing with, but most of the ideas that pre-moderns were “old” before their time or died young at wildly disproportionate rates are wildly inaccurate. Nice to have some specific examples to point to. (The biggest counter-example is we likely have more cancer than pre-moderns and have gotten better at treating it over the last century).
A favorite example from a business-school source (I know, i know) from my operations class that illustrated the point: if your head is in a refrigerator and your feet in a furnace, “on average”, you’re comfortable.You gotta be careful with averages!
Cheers,
Jeff
@ BorealBear # 404
Well, yes, there is a subtle difference between “work” which is part of an integrated way of life, and “toil” one is obliged to do to produce “added value” for strangers or starve, and I am very thankful that much of the work that I do is entirely unpaid, and a matter of my full “participation” in a larger web of relationships with the beings (not all human) in this place where I live. It does not even feel like work a lot of the time, even when sweat and muscular effort is involved, because I know exactly why I am doing it and how it fits me into the greater dance around me.
And, yes, I think children are very happy to participate, in this way, in the greater dance of the place and people in which they find themselves embedded. Tolerably often if you prevent them from participating at the age when they WANT to (usually because they cannot do it “right” and its quicker to do it yourself), they will lose any interest in participating at older ages when many parents (in my experience) begin to berate them for “never helping.” The article nicely illustrates how easily children can join in and be genuinely helpful if they are allowed to be and encouraged to be, at the age when they still WANT to.
And also, although as a teacher you may not be happy to hear me say this, I have come to believe that even the schools that we in the west voluntarily send our children to are doing exactly the same job of disrupting cultural transmission across generations that the “other” schools attended by (say) indigenous children who had been kidnapped from their parents performed. Somehow our schools have come to embody the entirety of what a child needs to learn in life, and parents, churches, schools, and cultures have come to embody everything that might hold a child “back”** in life, and this means that the “system” we are not allowed to be independent of, can simply re-program our children away from whatever independence that communities and families are able to carve out, and “steal” them back into the system.
Of course, there are many cracks in it… and perhaps, as a teacher, you might find a way to be a “crack”… 😉
** and yes, the word “back” also arises directly from the mythos of Progress
@Polecat, JMG: I was very much thinking of Herbert when I wrote my comment on eugenics. While the skills of the Bene Gesserit include much to admire from a magical POV, their program of long term genetic manipulation didn’t seem to work out quite as planned.
Also, I am reading that book by Spencer Sunshine mentioned in the previous open post. It’s good to know the neo-Nazi movement in America has been small as far as numbers are concerned, but like other fringe groups, its influence has spread further than the people directly involved. Eugenics was not far from my mind. The unholy alliance some of these people made with Charles Manson took it to another level of disturbing, and I once again recall the book CHAOS by Tom O’Neil. Some things really do have long lasting side effects.
Fifth Wednesday topic – I vote for Beardtree’s suggestion
“a discussion of technologies that work, but are ignored or denigrated because their results can’t be explained by mainstream “science”. Homeopathy is an example.”
Justin P. # 400:
“+ Be reliable
+ Avoid drama
+ Help other people win
+ Take care of your body
+ Take care of your mind
+ Live below your means
+ Treat your job as if it matters
+ Take care of your relationships”
Thank you for your tips! I’ll take note of them. I hope these advices will be taken into consideration by average commenters in JMG blog. However, I’m afraid our reckless and “crazy” elites (political and economical alike) aren’t going to pay attention to these wise tips for everybody’s lives…
——————————————————
JMG # 401:
“Our current economy is mostly hallucinatory, and hallucinations don’t have to obey the law of gravity.”
A good depiction of current economy, methink. By the way, I read some weeks ago a graphic novel-essay titled “La gran negación”(The Great Denial), by Roberto Grossi. It tells the reader in a fast but serious mood, the climate change and another ugly predicaments in which we’re “clogged”, thanks to capitalist-industrialist system. I don’t agree in everything of its ideas, but I remember with a wry smile a funny and sad scene, when a happy TV broadcaster (a ficticious character) tells his audience “Everything’s good: shares of stock around the world stock markets are going up!”. Meanwhile, his TV set is in flames behind him, but he doesn’t notice it yet. I think this book isn’t translated to English.
—————————————————-
Russell # 403:
“Thoughts on musical instruments that will survive the Long Descent and also be good to have during it?”
I tend to think old school musical instruments (made at hand by “luthiers”) are going to be made and sold in the future…for everybody who can pay them; because the Long Descent isn’t a Mad Max-like fast collapse. I see serious problems to go on making pianos, because they seem to depend more of industrial stuffs and works. On the other hand, for example, I think bongos are still hand made in some Caribbean and African countries, methink. I bet their prices would depend of stuffs and hand works used to make them.
Poorer people before Industrial Era, and even during my country post-civil war hard times, (until the ’60s), used to make for example some simple and small flutes cutting a cane (“Arundo donax”).
https://sierradebaza.org/?view=article&id=1749:arundo-donax&catid=179
Well, it wasn’t a very good nor accurate instrument, but according some witnesses (now deceased), like some old shepherds, you could play short melodies with those cane flutes.
On the other hand, I’ve found a site where they show you how to make DIY instruments…
https://www.instructables.com/Homemade-Musical-Instruments/
Good luck with your harmonica!
————————————————————
About the average life span in “old good times”(or “old bad times” according believers in god-like Progress:
I must tell you one of our national heroes, was a woman who survived a war against Napoleon (with some mild wounds), a typhus epidemic, and she gave birth three children…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agustina_de_Arag%C3%B3n
She died at 71. According some historical and demographical works here, average life span here was 42 years in Spain, in 1850. And you can read in my link she hadn’t an easy life (she was a lower class women, though she became a female national heroine).
JMG,
Speaking about peak oil and a pundit who was really wrong. I remember back in the mid 2000’s, I was traveling for business and ended up changing planes in the Houston airport. I went to the book store to get something to read on the next leg of the flight and Matthew Simmon’s book ” Twilight in the Desert” had just come out. There were stacks of them next to the display and an entire table of copies. They were flying off the shelves with nearly everyone in line in front of me buying a copy ( I did too). This was not the alternative energy crowd, these were all oilmen.
But Matt turned out to be totally wrong about Saudi Arabia, in the time frame he was talking about. So the failure to see Fracking coming was not the only set of blinders for the peak oil movement. I also remember the buzz when a few years later Matt died in a hot tub ( if I remember right) and we were convinced that skullduggery was afoot.
“a discussion of technologies that work, but are ignored or denigrated because their results can’t be explained by mainstream “science”. Homeopathy is an example.”
Mainstream science accepts homeopathy in some circumstances but doesn’t like calling it homeopathy. For example, the whole concept of vaccination is homeopathy using viruses.
JMG 401
> Duct tape is a fairly complex product
> requiring a range of petroleum-product inputs
Oh.
Good to know. Thank you for cluing me in. The subject is so logical, —with all that goo, duct tape has to have petroleum in it.
💨😮💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
> price discovery
I had never heard of ‘price discovery‘ by that name. I looked it up, and it sounds like two people dickering/haggling over a price:
A: $1,500.
B: $500.
A: $1,000.
B: $750.
Done. $750 it is.
💨💸💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Slink 402
> It’s like they try to keep it from happening, even if that’s maybe not the right thing.
It occurred to me that since the end of World War Two, Americans have been fed artificial living environments, first and foremost, the outer-space program, in the USA, beginning with JFK. Astronauts and cosmonauts could not live without those artificial arrangements.
Therefore, creating an artificial environment to keep an elderly and/or disabled husk-zombie isn’t a big leap to transform deaths into cash-cows.
“Death exists, so let’s profit from it.” It is a no-brainer that those lean toward greed would suggest that their class do all they can to profit from the many angles surrounding an upcoming death. “Elites” can’t possibly let a person die a natural death, because that would deprive them(selves) of PROFIT.
Ferengi, anyone?
Die? Rock bottom: that will cost two bars of latinum. Or here is the brochure on the four bars of latinum death.
💨💀💰💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
A couple of other factors that added to life expectancy were the discovery of germ theory and the treatment of epidemic diseases like smallpox, polio, etc, access to clean water , better waste disposal,and better food. Most of this would have taken place in the 1800s and early 1900s. More recently the only changes seem to have been hi tech and drug interventions adding a couple of years or months in end of life situations, which I think will prove too costly to maintain.
Stephen
JMG – Thanks for that. Apparently, not just in the US. One reason Cuba’s care has been so good was the prior go around of fuel shortages, when gardening skills and conservation were renewed and honed, and a more community-based health system developed. Eat well, move, do useful/kind things, find meaning….and avoid over/mis-treatment.
From the abstract of https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953608005066
“We identified 156 articles, seven of which met our search criteria. The articles analyzed five strikes around the world, all between 1976 and 2003. The strikes lasted between nine days and seventeen weeks. All reported that mortality either stayed the same or decreased during, and in some cases, after the strike. None found that mortality increased during the weeks of the strikes compared to other time periods. The paradoxical finding that physician strikes are associated with reduced mortality may be explained by several factors. Most importantly, elective surgeries are curtailed during strikes. Further, hospitals often re-assign scarce staff and emergency care was available during all of the strikes. Finally, none of the strikes may have lasted long enough to assess the effects of long-term reduced access to a physician. Nonetheless, the literature suggests that reductions in mortality may result from these strikes.”
Jeff Russell 419
Let’s say I don’t let one arm touch water for a month (and for that matter, anything else).
Then I get under a strong light, and take a gentle swipe with a stiff brush (like a bath brush) across the arm.
Note seeing dead skin cells getting dislodged big-time, falling to the ground.
Then take another swipe of the brush on the arm: more dead skin cells go bye-bye.
I swipe gently because the skin can’t take a lot. The operative words are threefold: gently; knowing when to stop; and how often. No soap necessary. This technique does well on non-stinky, outer large expanses of skin (like arm, leg, back), not niches.
As long as I don’t rub too hard as to injure skin, and figuring out frequency (daily? every other day? weekly?), the skin on my arm is perfectly fine long-term doing this. My skin likes it.
Now it may be that my 73-old skin is different than youngers, but it seems that part of what is going on when using a dry cloth (or dry brush), it is the dislodging of dead skin cells and getting those cells off, say, and onto the floor. And some fabrics are likely better at ejecting cells than others; a tight weave would not be good.
It isn’t the whole story, but microbes use dead skin cells for food and housing. Deprive them of food and housing, and microbes get mighty upset,— and leave.
💨🚿🛀🏼💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
All votes have again been counted. Thank you.
Anon, that may spin things in interesting directions!
Jeff, you might consider the linen cloth solution! (Now I’m wondering if nettle cloth, which has many of the same properties as linen, would fill that role too.) The business school example is a good one.
Justin, and Herbert pointed this out in one of the appendices to Dune; the Bene Gesserit thought they were in charge of everything and yet they were moved around like puppets by pressures they did not begin to understand.
Clay, yep. Matt and I exchanged some emails; I thought he was rushing the timetable, as of course it turned out he was.
Anon, you can get physicians to turn the most charming shade of beet red by pointing that out.
Northwind, that’s exactly what price discovery is. It’s the process by which participants in a transaction work out (“discover”) a price that they’ll both more or less accept. It’s also Kryptonite to stock bubbles and a great many other speculative absurdities, because very often the notional value of some speculative instrument is vastly higher than the amount that, when push comes to shove, someone will actually pay for it.
Stephen, basic water purification, indoor plumbing, and the advances in chemistry that resulted in the mass production of cheap soap did more for childhood survival than anything else before or since, as those cut digestive tract infections (the leading killer of children under 5) very sharply indeed. I hope we can preserve those.
Gardener, ha! Thank you for this. I note that the authors of the study were very careful to avoid the obvious issue, which is that much of current medical care causes more harm than good.
Re musical instruments: the ancients had musical instruments such as drums, rattles and other shakers, wind instruments like flutes and panpipes, and string instruments like lyres. Cultures that refined metals made instruments like cymbals. String instruments used strings made from the guts of animals. In the Foxfire books we were told that barn cats, besides their function as mousers, also contributed their guts to string instruments.
Chauquin 424
> harmonica
I bet making a harmonica by hand would take some “white-smithing” (metal tinkering) and a bit of woodworking/woodcarving.
About accordions. An accordion player once told me that an accordion is really a glorified harmonica. I suppose one could say the same for bagpipes.
💨🛍️🪈💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
You know, I’ve heard the apocalypse meme from so many voices over the years. I’ve never heard it so accurately described and examined as in the song Aenima, by Tool.
“Some say the end is near,
some say we’ll see armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will.
I sure could use a vacation from this
bulls**t three ring circus sideshow of
freaks here in this hopeless hole we call LA
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away
any effing time
any effing day
learn to swim, see you down in california bay.”
It actually acknowledges the desire for apocalypse, talks about why people want it – a desire for reality to harshly intrude on a world of illusions and fakery, for those unworthy, unable to swim, to forced to learn or drown. The song and the while album – also named Aenima – is an excellent attempt to acknowledge and explore the darker, hidden aspects of the mind and spirit. Not to wallow in it, but to allow one to face the truth of how one feels and try to purge it. Hence the song and album name – Aenmia combines Anima, or spirit, with Enema.
Of course, I doubt psychadelic metal is for everyone, but this post just made me think of those lyrics in that song.
Northwind Grandma #396:
You’re welcome. I think it did me some good too; as much as my intuition on the matter points in the correct direction, getting some real numbers never hurts.
I agree on the EU. I think it was sold to the people as convenience. At least my parents mainly talk about how nice it is that we can just visit our neighbouring countries without needing passports, being checked at the border, or needing to exchange currencies. And I get it, it’s nice to just go visit the Netherlands on a whim. Who knows, maybe the first two can even work in some ideal world—to the best of my knowledge, the US-Canadian border is largely unsecured and crossing it is generally no problem for US or Canadian citizens—but currently, the lack of border security means that people just randomly show up in this country and there’s nothing we can do about it. Surrendering our currency to eurocrats hasn’t been a particularly wise decision either.
Thank you for your ancestor’s story. I live some way north from where they come from, in the Rhineland, near Cologne. I’m happy to report that Catholics and Lutherans get along quite well these days. If only the same could be said for Christians and Muslims. (And Heathens such as myself, but we’re so few as to not even register. The few Catholic friends I’ve talked to about religion have been a little bewildered but nonetheless quite tolerant. I imagine that most Christians would fall anywhere between “you do you” and being decidely unimpressed. As a certain kind of Muslim doesn’t even care that the Quran says that Christians aren’t infidel enough to need murdering, I can’t imagine that “being unimpressed” would be the most negative reaction to somebody who does fall into a category that is explicitly green-lit for murder.)
When I was a teenager, I always wanted to move to the US. While I still have a soft spot for the land of the free, I am probably better off here among my people, such as they still are. Should the situation deteriorate to a point where that’s no longer given, I’ll keep Wisconsin in mind.
I wouldn’t necessarily call the situation no-win, though. The NGO complex that consumes hundreds of millions in tax euros every year (I’m starting to think that the “non” in non-governmental organisation is supposed to be a joke) certainly makes out like bandits. The rapists that receive suspended sentences probably can’t complain either. The 2.5 million foreigners on unemployment benefits. The criminal clans. My birthright is being sold for a mess of pottage but when I want to at least eat the pottage, I’m told that I’m selfish and should share with the less fortunate.
I do feel sorry for those foreigners that are not exploiting, murdering, or raping us and aren’t condoning these things. When we finally say that the whole lot has to go, it will affect honest people too, who were driven their home by war and explicitly told by our traitorous government that they should come here. Children who have been born here, who have made friends with the native people. Cousins, perhaps, of those foreigners who have married Germans. At this point, it seems too late for a different course. I do not want ethnic violence but I expect it will come to it sooner or later if these people don’t go. Thus, remigration might well be the merciful option. It’s a tragedy nonetheless.
(I’d be willing to make an exception for the aforementioned murderers and rapists. I don’t want them to go anywhere but to the gibbet. As we’re unlikely to repeal the ban of the death sentence anytime soon, though, I’ll settle for having them leave the country for good.)
—David P.
Hi JMG,
I’m interested to see what updates you make to your body of Peak Oil work as this series goes!
There’s something going on in my neighbourhood right now I thought you might find interesting. I see this as Peak Oil related, although probably more just general decline related, so sharing. As a slight pre-amble, there are two sets of political posters and graffiti that always get defaced or destroyed. The first is any anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian stuff (which is not what I’m discussing, just mentioning it because I’ve taken note of it), and the other is anti capitalist and pro-communist or anarchist stuff. Pro anarchist stuff is rare these days, although there IS an anarchist book fair that happens once a year, and these posters are so thoroughly defaced that it took me a while to figure out that that is even what they were, but pro-communist stuff does pop up regularly, and is quickly defaced also.
OK so that is the pre-amble taken care of. Within the last year a bunch of anti-capitalist stickers have been going up, stuff like “They are rich because we are poor” type messaging (perhaps not exactly that, but more or less that), with pictures of political figures, the most frequent one being Luigi Mangione. What has interested me – and I thought possibly yourself too – was that while they deface the messaging, nobody seems to care about the image, and it seems to me that just having Mangione’s image all over town, especially in the company of somebody like Malcom X (another figure in the series), is actually more politically powerful than any attached messaging. The context is obviously “we agree with this guy and hold him up to be a hero”. I am trying to decide if this is a clumsy mistake, (leaving his image untouched while destroying the messaging around him), or is a sign that the critics of this series also generally agree with his actions, which would be a rather wild possibility.
Thanks,
Johnny
Hi JMG,
Totally off-topic so feel free not to post.
Just thought that, given the topic a couple weeks ago, this might interest you:
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/07/06/resetting-xbox/
@Chris #413
That article is fascinating: it reads to me like the author is arguing with himself: “Why, since we know everything is great, is there so much evidence that it isn’t?”
@Patrick #406
That would be the natural uranium reactor in Gabon. When the area flooded the water acted as a moderator slowing the neutrons and increasing fission in the U-235 which heated up and boiled the water away which shut off the reaction. Repeat the cycle for thousands of years.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths-two-billion-year-old-only-known-natural-nuclear-reactor
@Scotlyn #376
Can confirm. Parents should take advantage of children’s natural interests. The only Christmas present I can remember (apart from the chemistry set which made a rotten egg smell) was a child-size spade. A proper one made for digging, not for making sand castles on the beach. Father Christmas had been informed well in advance that a spade was No 1 on the list of presents wanted. Both my mother and father were keen gardeners and my sister and I were dead keen on emulating them. We had a big property and we two kids were given a little patch of ground and some seeds and left to get on with it.
Unfortunately that was the end of it. They took no interest in what we were doing, offered no advice, and chased us away when they were busy gardening, making it clear we were a damned nuisance. We tried, and made all the newbie mistakes, and our crops were a disaster, and we lost interest and learned nothing, something I regret today when I have a small garden and little idea what to do with it.
@Chuaquin, Russell, JMG
Stringed instruments of the future might not have nylon or high tensile steel strings available. Perhaps now is the time to get in on the ground floor and train as a cat-gutter. /j
@Stephen #430
I did not make myself popular on a medical blog when I suggested that mothers with disinfectant and Band Aids had saved more children’s lives than all the doctors put together.
Hi again JMG!
This is a terrific and succinct way of stating a lot of what I’ve gotten from your writing – so thanks for this:
“As for what to do with the knowledge of peak oil, the first thing is to realize that there’s not much you can do with it. It’s the inescapable background of the rest of your life, it will shape everything around you in slow and subtle ways, and there’s no way to make it go away. Grasp that, and it becomes easier to find the actions that can improve your life, and avoid the mistakes that can drag you down.”
I think understanding this, and the fact that next to nobody will be convinced to see this, regardless of the arguments you use (I mean “you” as in myself, or any individual – not attacking you here JMG – to clarify!) is super helpful. Something I have found useful too is abandoning the idea of things “gaining value” with time, and instead thinking about what might lose money more slowly than other things. Also useful (and more directly from your work) has been to realize that you want to go down with everyone else, more or less. Again you probably want to do that in as gradual and controlled a manner as you can possibly ensure, but you don’t really want to be going up with others are going down, certainly not shooting way up above them owing to bitcoin, or investments, or gold or what have you.
I am not sure how widescpread they are, but I’ve seen some really nasty home invasion stuff in the news in Canada, owing to folks paying visits to known Bitcoin millionares looking to liberate the contents of their wallets, and using the very old fashioned methods of violently abusing the victim’s families to convince them to go along with this plan.
Thanks,
Johnny
Lazy Gardener 431
> avoid over/mis-treatment
When I read this, I saw “mis-treatment,” and my brain went immediately to:
“To avoid being abused,”
and for some reason, went instantly to “workplace abuse.” “Workplace abuse” is antithetical to one’s good health. One cannot live a good life while under systematic torture.
I just finished reading, “SPU: The Upside Down World of UPS (A Memoir on my Trials and Triumphs)“ by David Roy.
ISBN 1960756428.
Pub 2023.
Book Writing Studios.
You Pee Ess = the company here described📦. (I am ill-disposed to write the company name more than once.)
blurb: When David started at You Pee Ess over 40 years ago [1981], he was proud to have worked there. Little by little, the company chipped away at the pride he possessed. … Most people would just wonder why anyone would [could] stay in such a toxic environment. …
I cannot possible see You Pee Ess as a positive influence again.
When I think of “workplace abuse,” I think of this book. It is a miracle the author survived, and was able to soldier on,— to write this book.
💨📦💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Just one small thing to add in to the discussion of human life expectancy and statistical misunderstandings of its nature…
Menopause.
The existence of.
Menopause is a highly choreographed mid-life shut down of a woman’s reproductive system which does not (in principle) harm or shut down any other part of her living organism.
It turns a mother into a grandmother… in mythic terms it turns a mother into a crone, an elder.
It is extremely difficult to explain how this phenomenon could ever have evolved in a species that never lived past 35 until modern times. 😉
For those who might not know, nettle cloth is also called ramie. Ramie fabric was being sold in the USA a while back, but I haven’t seen any for a while. I am thinking of trying burlap for drywashing.
JMG,
A quote I remember from the late 1970’s that pretty much sums up peak oil and our current times. I have been looking for the source, I think it is Stewart Brand, but I am not sure.
” Those that use capital ( Petroleum) as if it were income are destined to live short flashy lives.”
Off energy but on desk jobs going away,
“Of today’s 4,800 layoffs at Microsoft, 1,600 will hit Xbox, with about 3,200 cuts in total expected through fiscal year 2027, according to Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox. In an email she sent to employees on Monday, Sharma called this “the most significant restructure in Xbox history.” “Our business today is not healthy,” Sharma wrote. “We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses.” ”
And why?
“Xbox is also flattening management hard, cutting the current 14 management layers to no more than five, but ideally three. ”
14 layers of management? My old employer had five from CEO to operator in the plant.. It was also five from CEO to mechanic in the maintenance department. My mind boggles at 14.
It just occurred to me that these comment threads are like a distributed discursive meditation. We start with a topic given by JMG, then take it from there. It is fascinating how the threads can go off topic, and it is a struggle at times to stop myself and think, am I going off topic? To bring this back on topic, the introduction of different topics as distractions is a classic move of those who do not want to think deeply about peak oil.
Jeff #419 – At the risk of even more personal details, I’ve noticed that around when I turned 65 years old, I could work up a sweat in the garden, or riding a bike, and develop no odor (AFAIK) after it dries. So, even as you’re changing your habits, your body is changing its chemistry. If you’re of a certain age, it’s much easier to avoid bad smells… but other bad smells tend to develop later (or so I hear).
Northwind (#402) Re: end-of-life care. My parents died in 2023. My father first, with some sort of leukemia that stopped responding to treatment at age 87, so they sent him home to be cared for by my mother and a visiting hospice nurse. The covid panic was winding down, but he didn’t want us to expose ourselves to various risks in driving from Maryland to rural Michigan, so we just talked over the phone as he grew weaker and weaker, until the morning when Mom called to say that he had passed.
Then Mom lived alone, with regular visits from neighbors and friends, from March to October, celebrating her 90th birthday cheerfully, but with private complaints about how being 90 was not much fun. Then she had a stroke, was taken by a neighbor to the hospital, which (after a day or two of tests) sent her back home, for us to watch over her as she died (with hospice oversight). It didn’t take more than a few hours. I noticed that I could no longer hear her raspy breathing, and called other family members to the bed side. Then she took a deep breath, swallowed (as one might do, before diving into cold water), and left us.
We all agreed that THESE were deaths to aspire to. They had made all the proper arrangements to avoid heroic end-of-life care/abuse, and to settle the estate between their four sons without argument. In mathematical terms, I’d call this an “existence proof”. You only need one example to show that something is possible, no matter how unlikely.
Thank you again for your response, JMG.
If I am understanding you correctly, what you are proposing is indeed something essentially different from both hyperinflation and a deflationary depression or some complicated combination of the two – all of which are essentially unstable. You seem to be describing a carefully managed and essentially stable path of modest-to-high inflation that extends over many decades, or even a century or more, with the purchase value of the currency decreasing relentlessly, but never quite becoming negligible either, and with continually increasing hallucinated financial asset values functioning as a store of wealth for the well-to-do.
I believe you may be correct that the elites would prefer this outcome, though I would want to see some documentation indicating this commitment, and the lengths to which they willing to go to achieve it, if it is available.
A counter-argument to this claim is the assertion, which I think can be historically demonstrated to have occurred on multiple occasions in the past, that elites have at times deliberately engineered deflationary depressions, with a view to using the general panic, confusion, and demoralization to buy up assets for pennies on the dollar.
But even if they are WILLING to achieve the outcome you suggest they are aiming for at the present juncture of history, it does not follow that they will be ABLE to do so over such an extended time, without the system at some point destabilizing in a way that leads to the elites losing control.
For one thing, I agree that financial valuation across all asset classes is in substantial measure hallucinated, but I do not think that this is entirely true. Insofar as financial valuations have a very basic and a very rough basis in objective material reality, the relentless decline in the real economy of goods and services that Peak Oil has already been bringing about for 20 years will tend to act as an ongoing factor promoting episodic destabilization in patterns of financial valuation. This relentless real world decline, moreover, will tend to destabilize in the direction of deflation, since real world decline tends to promote an accurate sense that the value of the real economy of goods and services is decreasing in value.
In this way, I think that Peak Oil itself will contribute to periodic bouts of substantial collapses in asset values that are quite sudden. This already happened in 2004-2009, for example, when the rise in oil prices to levels that have still not been exceeded to the present day on the global markets helped trigger the Great Financial Crisis.
Insofar as financial valuations have a substantial component that is in fact hallucinated, it is not at all clear that the elites will able to maintain full control over what the masses hallucinate indefinitely either. Panic and fear might at some future point get out of the elite’s control, as it did in some measure in 2000 and in 2008, but to a much greater extent, and destroy the hallucinations that they have been so carefully cultivating.
Again, the relentless decline in the real economy that provides some rudimentary measure of reality to financial valuations will tend to act as a trigger inciting such panics that affect not only the real components of financial valuations, but the hallucinated components as well. This, too, clearly happened in the 2004-2009 timeframe, in my opinion.
But sometimes uncontrollable panics affect the purely hallucinated component of valuations alone – this is what happened in 2000, I believe, and is illustrative of how the fickleness of the masses’ hallucinations sometimes escapes elite control. Here, the trigger was massive debt – is that debt real or hallucinated, by the way? – which is also something we have now, to a much greater extent than a quarter century ago.
If you think, on the contrary, that the elites will invariably be able to get on top of the dynamic of instability I have sketched above in its incipient stages, and prevent it from getting out of control over a timespan of several generations, I would like to know how. Beyond any preliminary remarks you may have at the present time, I am very much looking forward to your detailed discussions of these issues in future posts.
At this page is the full list of all of the non-faith-specific requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 7/7). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Jule from Iserlohn, Germany (whose baby is due mid-July) have a pleasant pregnancy and birth.
May Lukeszy’s dad completely recover from his recent cancer surgery, and be completely healed of any cancer that might remain.
May Helen in Oz be free of inflammation in her biceps and shoulder, and may she be successful in the slow process of regaining pain-free range of movement and increased muscle mass and strength therein.
May JC of Geauga County, Ohio, who is fighting cancer, be blessed and uplifted so that he may receive the healing he needs and recover as best as possible. (7/6)
May 1Wanderers’s partner Cathy, who is still undergoing chemotherapy in preparation for a surgery, be given the physical and mental strength to fight it, and tolerate the treatment; may she enjoy a full and permanent recovery.
May Dustin, a relative of Brenainn, who still has some lingering issues in his ongoing recovery from a heart condition, be healed and strengthened.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis’s reconstructive surgery on his left ureter go well; may his right kidney heal; and may his empty nose syndrome abate.
May Brother Kornhoer be able to afford his son’s international surgery.
May Alex R. be blessed in his efforts to resolve his financial situation, and successfully get completely out of debt within the current year 2026; may he find opportunities toward that end, and also the wisdom to recognize and seize them when they come.
May a safe and happy home environment be enjoyed by Laurelmirror, her daughter, and her mother, as well as protection from evil influences. May their family situation be resolved in such a way that Laurelmirror’s mother will get a chance to recover physically and mentally from the stresses it has caused.
May Kallianeira come to understand or face the entity or issue that seems to have trapped her, causing problems in her material circumstances, causing expensive troubles that threaten to force her out of home and mind, and leaving her burnt out and overwhelmed despite every attempt to find real help. May she quickly find out what to do and how to act to overcome these hardships.
May Geoff G’s sister Lindsay, who suffered a stroke at the end of May, recover to the fullest extent possible, and be blessed and supported in her mental wellbeing throughout.
May Mathew Damon Gallowglass, who has been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, be treated successfully for his condition and make a full recovery.
May Lisa C be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from breast cancer.
May 6 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Bob W of Lake County, Ohio’s treatment for cancer go well so that he may heal and recover as quickly as possible.
May Larry Mulford, who has entered hospice after a year battling with pancreatic cancer, pass in the smoothest possible manner, and may his wife be enveloped in our love.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
On the longevity issue: I am 86. and in good health. I had a ruptured appendix at age six, which along with surgery was treated with penecillen, which had just been released for civilian use that year. It had existed before, but been reserved for the military during WWII. In earlier times that would have killed me. I have had various infectious diseases: hepatitis, amoebic dysentery, which might or might not have killed me earlier. Then again the odds of my traveling to Asia would have been much less. I had a hip replacement a couple of years ago. The hip would have crippled but not killed me. My point is that ,except for the appendix, had I lived in a healthy rural environment with adequate food, I see no reason I wouldn’t have lived to my present age, not dying in my 40s or 50s. Even the bible speaks of a life span of three score and ten.
Stephen
“If you think, on the contrary, that the elites will invariably be able to get on top of the dynamic of instability I have sketched above in its incipient stages, and prevent it from getting out of control over a timespan of several generations, I would like to know how. Beyond any preliminary remarks you may have at the present time, I am very much looking forward to your detailed discussions of these issues in future posts.”
Also contributing to the instability is likely to be any set of counter-elites trying to take over from the current set of bureaucratic managerial elites currently in power, such as the entrepreneurial elites that John Michael Greer has proposed in the past. A civil war breaking out in the United States between the bureaucratic managerial elites and the future entrepreneurial elites for example is not going to be helpful to anybody who wants to indefinitely inflate economic bubbles in the United States. If the same entrepreneurial counter-elites decide to throw off the Faustian pseudomorphosis in America and move on to something else, then there is no longer any reason to inflate economic bubbles, since only Faustian civilization is interested in infinite expansion.
Thanks JMG for the solar DIY site you mentioned, thanks Phil #209 for washing machine troubleshooting and anyone else if they commented. I’m trying to spend less time online, it bothers my eyes plus it’s our whole model-to-our-son mode of not being on devices all the time!
I second Athaia’s, #291, idea of a Dreamwidth column for practical decline ideas at this stage. It’s where we will be for the forseeable future. On my end, I’d love to do a microbakery out of my kitchen but it’s illegal in our city and there are neighbors who would complain if I did it on the sly. I could bake and barter but we could also use the extra cash.
As for our failing washing machine, we think it’s having electrical not mechanical problems; it doesn’t want to switch from one mode to another, say wash to drain. We have to manually set it for each mode. But at least it works somewhat. It is an 18 year old front loader but we’ll try and see if someone can fix it 1st before we replace it.
And I second fridge and washing machine as top solar- powered needs!
Ellen in ME
P.S. Anyone out there ever made a button lamp, like the one in Laura Wilder’s Long Winter? We’ve been listening to it and I want to make one. She made it out of cloth, a button and axle grease.
Slogging through the comments now . . .
Thanks Chuaquin for the link to the Washing Machine Project, #246. While we do something like that with 2 buckets, one perforated, and a toilet plunger, those machines look easier to use. Maybe my son can go into designing and making products like that (the useful trades Bofur mentioned).
Also, Catoctin, #251, please do post the plans for that brick rocket stove. We have a small commercial one but have been wanting to build one out of bricks . . . another necessary skill that will be a “fun” project to do with our son! You can always email me about it at ammarafa at yahoo. I’d love to hear what other things you do in your homeschool nature program.
We’ve seen a few of those kei trucks here in Maine. My son, by the way, got one as remote control toy truck from my sister.
And thanks to all for some many inspiring ideas to ponder. It’s why I love this space!
Ellen in ME
Stephen P. # 418:
“These e bikes have to be pedaled to start, but can then go by throttle if the battery is charged enough”
According laws here, these bikes which need to be pedaled to start, and then don’t need more pedaling to run, aren’t bikes, but motorbikes (well, mopeds). That kind of vehicle was ridden by the unfortunate young Latin migrant in my town, so he’s going to pay the local police fine, because he rode a moped, not a real bike. It seems traffic laws are harder in Spain than in Mexico…
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Homeopathy:
The only reasonable explanation for mainstream science rejection of this “fake” science, in spite of its god performance for health, it’s evident: mainstream science is biased by its materialist philosophy (or philosophies) in which it relies. We don’t know how it works according a materialist theory, so “it doesn’t exist” or “it shouldn’t exist”, in every case, for mainstream scientists, and their cheerleading “skeptical” groups.
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Northwind G. # 435:
Yes, an harmonica needs some hand skills with some wood and a bit of metal work to be made, but it could be likely to make it handcrafted in the long term future. Although a cane pipe like I’ve written before is easier to be made, I think it sounds worse than harmonica.
I know there are a few craftsmen who make today bagpipes here; it seems this folk music instrument was on the verge of disappearing forever some decades ago, but there’s a slow recovery in this kind of instruments makers. So I bet this craft could go on into the future…I’ve got more doubts about acordeon, which indeed seems IMHO, a technologically more complex music instrument than old bagpipe.
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David P. # 437:
“I do not want ethnic violence but I expect it will come to it sooner or later if these people don’t go. Thus, remigration might well be the merciful option.”
I don’t buy the depiction of every migrant people as “beings of light”, according our “left” kidnapped by wokesters since some years ago: migrants who commit crimes are a minority of the whole foreigners, but I bet more than the half of crimes are commited by some migrants (I bet it because our wokeized MSM never tell you which national origin has criminals in the news (cough).
However, the far right “solution” to the problem (or must I to say “predicament”?) of massive legal and non legal migration is too optimist. Remigration can’t work in the short term, because EU keeps being a light bulb who will go attracting butteflies from poorer countries for a while. In the long term, only the decline and final fall of the EU bureaucracy will let countries with more sovereignty. Then, each country could close tightly its borders and begin to deport foreigners in masse…Good luck with this measeure! It’s likely the remigration “beneficiaries” would react in an angry mood, especially people from muslim countries origins.
I sadly think the genius is out the bottle, since the “refugees” operation was commited by our reckless and blind elites, some years ago. So I tend to think remigration claims from the right wing are more political propaganda than a really feasible action in the near future.
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Martin B. # 441:
Well, old school string instruments were made by luthiers using animal origin guts (goat or lamb, for vegans dismay), not much time ago, in a historical sense.
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Lathechuck # 449:
It’s been a commonplace for a long time (at least here) that people smell different when they get old, but I haven’t a serious opinion about it, wether it’s a real thing due to hormones o whatever else, or (ahem) an stereotype from young people against the elder. I think some old people smell bad, not for their age, but because they can’t (or they don’t want) to have a regular good bath. Others suffer incontinency. But some dirty young people smell worse than some elder…
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#450:
I see you lived a hard experience, but in a normal life everybody sooner or later, is going to be its parents death. I sometimes think in it, trying not to be too sad. My parents are alive, but they’re getting old like every human being on Earth, too.
Paedrig, thank you for this! That’s exactly the attitude I hear from people very often these days, and understandably so. Life in a decaying empire sucks.
Johnny, fascinating. That bears very close watching.
Caldathras, yep. The first wave of massive salary class downsizing is hitting. There will be more, of course.
Martin, making gut strings is certainly a growth industry, though sheep gut was much more often used than other sources. Wire is a challenging thing to make unless you’ve got enough of an industrial system to make and use the specialized dies, and nylon of course is a petrochemical product.
Johnny, good gods. I hadn’t heard that the home invasions had started already. I’ve been predicting for twenty years that this was going to happen, though I thought it would be gold rather than bitcoin that would bring it on. Thanks for the heads up.
Scotlyn, and it’s a very sensible adaptation for a species capable of old age. You don’t want your older females reproducing, since the likelihood of health problems in mother and child alike goes up, and you don’t want older females to be burdened by the biological cost of ovulation and menstruation So the cycle shuts down and the women can go on being useful and productive members of the community for decades more. So if you have a species that gets old, it’s something that will be selected for.
Clay, Brand used to understand that. Then he became a cornucopian and a cheerleader for nuclear power, which is just one more way to use capital as income. In him I see the tragedy of his whole generation.
Siliconguy, those fourteen layers of management are a normal product of the college-to-cubicle pipeline in an age where it’s a high priority to make sure that graduates of even the most useless degrees get corporate or government jobs. That’s ending now, and something a little less stupid will take its place.
KAN, excellent. I suggest that as a topic for meditation. 😉
Denizen, you noted in an earlier comment that you found it “astonishing, baffling, disheartening – and, perhaps most of all, infuriating” that the system was able to keep chugging along with only brief and temporary disruptions, even though you (like many other people) believed that it was sure to crash to the ground. I’m trying to suggest to you the reason why your ongoing faith in imminent, inevitable financial collapse is mistaken, as it clearly has been. All those decades of failure to collapse are trying to tell you something! Now of course you’re free to believe as you wish, but you might find it useful to recognize that the conviction that collapse is imminent is not a source of accurate predictions, and change your course accordingly. All this will be discussed in much more detail in a later post, of course.
EcoPrayer, thanks for this.
“Homeopathy:
The only reasonable explanation for mainstream science rejection of this “fake” science, in spite of its god performance for health, it’s evident: mainstream science is biased by its materialist philosophy (or philosophies) in which it relies. We don’t know how it works according a materialist theory, so “it doesn’t exist” or “it shouldn’t exist”, in every case, for mainstream scientists, and their cheerleading “skeptical” groups.”
Yet nonetheless mainstream science has accepted vaccination for decades despite not having a materialistic mechanism for how a small amount of viruses or pathogens is supposed to protect the human body from a virus or pathogen infection. See e.g. the numerous Vaccination Acts passed by the United Kingdom in the 19th century, before Robert Kock in 1890 showed that microorganisms might be the cause of various kinds of disease and before the discovery of viruses in 1896.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_Act
One can argue that mainstream science still doesn’t have a purely materialistic mechanism for why vaccination works, since the immune system also operates on the etheric plane, and any etheric effects of vaccination are largely ignored by mainstream science but nonetheless likely contributes to a huge portion of why vaccination seems to work in practice.
Chuaquin @ 457
Traffic laws in Mexico are non-existent, or very selectively enforced. None of the teen or younger motorcycle riders have licences or have to have any kind of instruction or test. Many car drivers don’t have licences. It is probably stricter on the highways.
Even in California the e bike situation seems a bit confusing. There are three classes. Class one is just battery assist, and must be pedaled, class two I’m not sure, class three will operate by throttle and go 30 mph, but is only meant to go 20 mph in a bike lane or if the rider is under 16.
David P#437 Chuaquin . A nazi philosopher called Jaume Farrerons argues that the European oligarchs have ploted an etnical war for to destroy Western Europe. The mechanical has two movements:
1) Bring many millions of Moors and South Saharians inmigrants
2) Encourage xenophobic forces.
The goal would be to transform Western Europe in a version of Lebanon.
Since the topic drift has gone from peak oil to the efficacy of modern medicine, and some of us are indulging in an “organ recital” I’ll chip in with my own experience. I had pyloric stenosis at 3 months old. Corrected by life-saving surgery followed by 10 days in hospital. Years later I had a ruptured appendix (after an ill-advised GI series) corrected by surgery, followed by pneumonia and 15 days in hospital. Thirty two years ago, in 1994, I had a severe small bowel obstruction, corrected by surgery, followed by gastroparesis and totaling 22 days in hospital. (I had Kaiser Permanente, Northern California, coverage and never saw a bill.) Since then I’ve been pretty healthy. I do fault the medical industry for many things, but it saved my life three times.
@Northwind Grandma #432 and @Lathechuck #449 re: Hygiene
Thanks for these! I hadn’t considered changing body chemistry as a factor, but that makes sense. I also have not at all controlled for diet, which as we all know can also have a significant effect. I suppose I have the perfect natural laboratory in the shape of a Texas summer to experiment in. If I find anything interesting out, I’ll share here!
Cheers,
Jeff
So I have a hypothesis about Enchantment and Disenchantment – Astrological Ages are generally periods of Enchantment, while the boundary between two successive Astrological Ages are periods of Disenchantment.
So for instance, the current age is a period of Disenchantment. The previous age was the age of Pisces, and while it had begun before the Satyricon had been composed, it didn’t really take root until the collapse of the Classical World. Likewise, the Aquarian Age shall not take root until this phase collapses.
I was watching a video about Julian Jayenes and his theory of the Bicameral Mind – that until the Late Bronze Age Collapse, people were having hallucinations and intrusive thoughts and their culture normalised referring to these as the voices of the Gods. He bases this on the fact that (allegedly) Mesopotamian texts from just before the collapse lament that the Gods have gone silent, then the collapse happened, and afterwards they continued to perform rituals to try and “bring the Gods back”. Jayenes argued that the bicamerality (schizophrenic tendency to hear voices) ended because society reached a level of complexity where people couldn’t operate without Theory of Mind, which made them “conscious”. Of course, this reminded me immediately of Disenchantment.
But if this is indeed a recorded instance of a society facing widespread cultural Disenchantment, and it happened right when the next age (of Aries) was around the corner, that seems to tell me that the Gods vanish right when the Age is near an end and the cusp of the next age is close. They reappear once the cusp is gone.
@Scotlyn (#444):
Almost every non-literate culture I’ve read about in anthropological studies gives older (post-menopausal) females an absolutely central role in maintaining that culture’s structure. It is they, far more than older males, who have spent a lifetime building wide networks of people, who keep fresh in everyone’s lives the essential patterns of culture, and who preserve vast quantities of essential lore. And mostly they do this utilizing what was called “soft power” in an earlier post here. (Think “church ladies.”) Also, women tend to outlive men, so the oldest members of any culture generally skew female..
Our culture happens to privilege “nuclear families” (so called), where a mother and a father together transmit their culture to their children. Other cultures do not. Among the Diné (Navajo), for example, a woman may have children by various men, none of whom will be deeply involved in their children’s upbringing; instead it is the mother’s brothers who play that role in her children’s life. And the fathers of her children are not free of child-rearing burdens: they help raise the children of their respective sisters.
I would go so far as to say that without substantial numbers of post-menopausal women in every generation, our species would have evolved as it actually did, have formed the culture-patterns that it did, or even have survived and evolved as long as it has. They are key!
JMG – Re: X-box with 14 layers of management… Do you realize that, if each “manager” has just two subordinates, 14 layers of management would require 2^15-1 = 32767 members?! That seems absurd, so maybe some layers of management were threads, rather than trees. One boss, one over-boss, one-underboss, layer after layer.
The long emergency on the long road down from conventional peak c. 2005. From the Bush II freak show then to the current WWF 2026 Yankee-led extravaganza against Eurasia and on towards our techno-fascist AI utopia where Aryan civilisation finally subjugates RoW … I’m actually more optimistic nowadays than back in 2005. The political circus in the collective West is failing its prime directive which is propaganda control of its domestic audiences in a Weltanschauungskrieg on the hoi polloi. At the same time it looks like we’re past peak all-crude vs synthetic in 2018. I thought in 2005 that a back of the envelope guess would be mid-2030s for s***-meet-fan, and I still think we’re on the slow roll towards that genuine peak oil driven push into the long transition away from diesel as the backbone of global industry. F*** the petrol car fleet, what do we do about the heavy machinery and shipping that holds our 21st C world together? I’ll be 87 in 2050 and would really like to see how it’s playing out mid-century and beyond!
@Rajarshi (#464):
Janyes’ clever theory is far too simple, and it is not so much that the Gods have gone “silent” as that changing cultural norms forbid hearing their “voices.” The anthropologist Tanya Marie Luhrmann has done excellent work on the prevalence of such “voices” heard even now in a range of cultures. (See her website at https://www.tanyaluhrmann.com/ and a long list of her academic publications at https://stanford.academia.edu/tanyaluhrmann .)
Indeed, even some of the higher primates, who lack human-type language, display behavior on occasion very similar to the awe-struck behavior of people who have been deeply struck by an unexpected numenous encounter. Papers by James B. Harrod, Barbara Smuts, and Barbara J. King have provided ample documentation of this.
Hi JMG,
Here’s the story that reminded me of your warnings about Gold. I was born in Trinidad, so am sort of used (to some degree) to the idea of this kind of thing, but it’s surprising to see in Canada.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bitcoin-hostage-millions-cryptocurrency-9.6987994
That particular incident was dramatic enough that it was on the news a fair bit at the time, but I have seen other stories that were less ghastly (I’ve been loosely following the increasing severity of robberies and kidnappings here for a while – mostly because it seemed to me that Trinidad was just ahead of the curve on some of these strategies (especially after I looked into extraction rates of the oil reserves down there and realized they peaked not long after I was born!)). Here’s an article from a couple years earlier where police were warning about this Bitcoin targeting being on the rise.
https://www.wealthprofessional.ca/investments/alternative-investments/police-warn-canadian-crypto-investors-may-be-at-risk-from-home-invasions/378171
With regard to the Mangione stickers, I’ll remmeber you were interested in this, and I’ll report back if I notice any developments that seem notable.
Thanks!
Johnny
PS to my earlier post to Rajarshi on Jaynes’ hypothesis:
For more on Luhrmann’s work, take a look at:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250902-the-places-where-hearing-voices-is-seen-as-a-good-thing
Anon (if I may), the rejection of homeopathy has an economic basis, not a theoretical one. Like pretty much all the other therapies rejected by mainstream medicine as crackpot pseudoscience, it doesn’t put money into the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry — most homeopathic remedies passed out of patent protection more than a century ago, and can be made cheaply by any pharmacy with simple equipment. (I’ve read pharmacy textbooks from the 1920s that explain in detail how an ordinary pharmacist can make up homeopathic medicines quickly and easily with equipment on hand.) For the pharmaceutical industry, that’s disastrous, since patent protection of brand new drugs is central to its profit model. Funding pseudoskeptic organizations is thus a necessary bit of marketing for Big Pharma.
Rajarshi, hmm! That’s an interesting speculation, and the data known to me seems to support it. Jaynes’ theory doesn’t work — among other things, it’s based on an absurdly oversimplified model of brain-hemisphere relations — but that doesn’t change the reality of the facts that he cites.
Lathechuck, no doubt. Did you ever read Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum when you were a child? In that story, we learn that the Royal Army of Oz consists of twenty-six officers and one private. After the battle with the Nome King’s minions, the private is promoted to the officer corps, and after that Oz was never again able to go to war, due to a lack of ordinary soldiers. Many current corporations remind me of that scene…
Zeug, I’ll be 88 that year, and according to an investment broker I talked to on the phone today, I’m statistically supposed to be good until 92 at this point, so I’ll look forward to the view from the half-century mark. The collapse of propaganda, though, is normal during an elite replacement cycle of the sort we’re going through right now; the same people who are chucking the old propaganda are busy in the usual way coining a new set for clever kleptocrats to use. My guess is that the twilight of diesel will be a prolonged one, made more so by economic relocalization, but we’ll see. (BTW, please do be a little more sparing with the profanity. This is an all ages blog, remember! You can always use “frack” and “shale” as swear words if you like.)
Robert (if I may), hmm! Delighted to see that Luhrmann is still pushing the boundaries of the academically publishable. Her book Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft was very good.
Johnny, thanks for these. Yeah, that’s something to watch very carefully — and another good reason not to fall into the trap of thinking that stores of notional financial value are a useful strategy as things wind down.
@Caldathras #439 RE : Xbox layoffs.
I see a lot of fans of that industry kicking up a big stink. I get it, people don’t like to see their hobby take a hit. But they have to realize, that entire industry is MASSIVELY over stuffed. Too many people chasing too few resources.
I few months back I saw something on Reddit about my local city and publishing videos games. About a dozen people all jumped in and presented their latest products that had come out in the last 6 months. That is a dozen video games, from a single city in less than a year. And how many cities are there he world over that can produce this kind of stuff, possible a hundred or more? That is a lot of money going into the money furnace. In the same way the Kenney knew to get out of stocks when the shoe shine boy starts giving advice, seeing a large amount of people chasing money and pitching their video games shows the market is ready to correct.
Yeah it is good they have a passion, but of all the things out there, I don’t think the world is dependent on video games in any way. It will easily be sacrificed on the down slope especially as the costs related to this stuff continues to spiral out of control.
Also, I do like that Microsoft showed their hand a little and said they have 14 layers of Management! That is wild to see. I forgot who it was in DOGE who said it, but they admitted there wasn’t as much waste in government as initially thought because it turns out the government wasn’t run as poorly as an IT company. That’s not to say they didn’t find waste, just not 14 layers of management waste. Maybe only 12 layers. 😉
I’d argue every species (at least technically) has an age that counts as “old” for that species. But in most species, both sexes are capable of reproduction right up until they become old enough to die of “old age.” The number of species that have a physiologically programmed capacity to have a second, non-reproductive, stage of maturity BEFORE becoming “old” is a much smaller number.
tl;dr the members of every species can get “old” – its just a matter of there being a cohort that has not not died young. But not every species can consistently produce a cohort of “elders” as the human species both can, and regularly, consistently, does.
@ Robert M #465
Yes. Exactly. Exactly!
Although, the capacity to host a cohort of male “elders”, is, to my mind, just as critical to the retention and cross-generational transmission of cultural memory and practices.
It is just that mothers must absolutely be freed from the immediacy of the needs of the “child at foot” as it were, in order to be capable of serving as “elders” while still mature, but not yet old, while this “programmed severance” is not as biologically imperative for men.
Chuaquin #457:
Granted, the EU will be a problem, though there’s some cause for cautious optimism: remember the “send them back” chants when they voted for return hubs? Times are changing…
There’ll always be the British option, too. If it comes to that, both public opinion and political power will have shifted so much that we won’t be betrayed like the Brits with the Boriswave.
You don’t need to physically grab and remove people for remigration. I’m all for doing that to criminals and I don’t really care if those object. That’s why the police are armed. Trump has proven that it’s possible.
Then, you restrict welfare to citizens. Given the choice between leaving and starvation, the foreigners abusing our welfare system will presumably opt for the former. The ECJ will object, if we’re still in the EU. Let them. What are they going to do about it?
These two measures will already affect millions of people directly. I’d assume that out of those not directly affected, quite a few will get the message and also leave. After that? As I said, I’m not particularly interested in violence against the innocent and there’s arguably no non-violent way to deport someone. We could perhaps financially incentivise people to leave and renounce their citizenship. Even if we stop at that point, though, we’ll be much better off than now.
That the above will happen is optimistic, of course. Still, public opinion is drifting further and further to the right on these issues, no matter what the mainstream media are saying. Who knows what political power in Europe will look like in five years.
Anselmo #461:
But why would they want a Lebanon in Europe?
—David P.
New data point to offer here:
My employer supplies circuit protection devices to a variety of industries. We just this morning received request for quotation from a telecom customer for one particular item in a quantity that would represent about 10 months of throughput on that production line. On further investigation such requests typically turn out to be some clerk typing too many zeros in the ‘quantity’ box, but not this time – this time, apparently, it’s for real and they really do want enough circuit breakers to sink a ship.
The last time this sort of thing happened was immediately prior to the Nortel crash about 25 years ago. I am ever so thankful to not have invested my life’s savings in telecom stock, as this looks like the rapid swelling of a bubble ready to pop.
Thanks again, JMG. I look forward to your further posts about these matters with great anticipation, and with high regard for your astuteness as a student of these matters. For the moment, permit me to make some additional points that I hope continue to extend the conversation in a productive and fruitful direction:
We did actually have a fairly recent abrupt financial collapse of some magnitude post-COVID, extending roughly from 2021-2023, when the stock market went down by over a third in a matter of months, and then the global bond bubble burst, wiping out several major regional banks, and leading a lot of funds that rely on debt-based financial instruments to quietly limit withdrawals.
I cite these events as evidence of the continuing inherent instability of the financial system, though I anticipate that you will cite them as evidence that the elites are getting better and better at managing the system, and keeping its tendencies to instability under control using the methods you describe: Quietly restricting withdrawals from funds, blowing bubbles in other asset classes, carefully managing and restricting information about the true state of things that is allowed to reach the general public, etc.
Consider the point granted that the elites are getting better and better at managing and containing manifestations of instability in the system. That is not surprising – they have had well over 100 years now to practice and hone their techniques of financial system manipulation in the context of the currently prevailing global financial regime of unaccountable national central banks, all of which quietly answer to the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in Switzerland.
However, though they have managed to contain the systemic instabilities that led to that recent collapse so far, it is not at all clear that they will succeed in this endeavor indefinitely into the future. Right now, for example, the principal bubble-du-jour is in AI, and even you have asserted repeatedly that this particular bubble will inevitably burst. Do you really think a bubble this massive can possibly deflate without the accompaniment of some pretty substantial manifestations of abrupt financial system turbulence and instability?
It is also worth noting, in this regard, that over two-thirds of a century elapsed between the massive global financial instabilities of the 1920s-1930s, and the more recent ones of 2000 and 2008 that we pretty much all recall. As such, if we had been having the present discussion in the 1990s, for example, you would have been able to point not merely to 20, but to 60 years of largely stable financial history to back up the assertion that the elites would be able to maintain systemic stability indefinitely.
Indeed, those who are old enough will probably remember the tremendous amount of hubristic complacency in mainstream political and financial discussions expressive of exactly that conviction. A lot of this effusiveness, at the time, centered around the cultivation of a hero-worship cult of the personage of Alan Greenspan, the then-Chair of the US Federal Reserve.
And yet, a decade later, the global financial system experience a protracted period of great instability and turbulence. I am inclined to draw the conclusion that the fundamental instabilities inherent in the system were fairly well-contained by the elites for about the last 2/3s of the 20th century, but never went away, as evidenced by the crises of 2000 and 2008.
I also think that, though contained for now, the fact that this temporary collapse happened only 5 years ago establishes that the current phase of stability of the global financial system does not quite go back 15-20 years to the Great Financial Crisis, as you assert, but only 5 or so. That weakens the basis for any arguments that project an elite capacity for maintaining financial stability into the indefinite future, based on their manifest success of having done so for a lengthy period of the past leading into the present.
Lastly, even though the elites are getting better and better at managing the instability of the system using various forms of deception, subterfuge, and legerdemain, the challenge of doing so is also a lot more formidable in the 21st century than it was in the 20th. The 60 years of success in covering over financial instability that prevailed in the latter part of the 20th century was predicated on the advantage of an underlying economy of real material growth.
By contrast, the reality of Peak Oil constitutes an additional destabilizing factor that was largely absent during the 20th century. The elites are racing to keep up with this additional destabilizing factor, and so far, they are doing a pretty good job (at achieving a perverse goal).
But it is not at all clear that their capacities in this regard are omnipotent. Especially when one adds the extrinsic destabilizing factor of Peak Oil to the sources of instability inherent to the financial system itself, I would say it is highly likely that the elites will NOT, at the present juncture, be able to maintain the continual stability of the global financial system for another 40 years, so as to match their achievement of the 20th century.
With all due respect, I am currently inclined to label the conviction that their capacities are essentially omnipotent the “Greenspan Fallacy.” That is to say, your own thinking on these matters may currently be being affected more than you realize by the social contagion of complacency and delusional hope that helps keep the current financial bubble afloat.
But I am also open to being persuaded that the present epoch differs from the 1990s in such a way as to make the historical parallel between the 1990s and the present that I am drawing inapplicable.
A thought came to me this morning: 3 stages of certain sorts of work.
In my grandparents’ day, what mattered was, if you could do the job, and my Uncle Ralph rose from bank teller to a responsible position , with corresponding raises, with nobody even thinking about whether he’d been to college.
In my day, that started to change. My late ex-husband was an electronic calibration technician for a fairly new firm, in the day of its founders, and an excellent one. Fairly late in his life, the firm’s founder having passed on, he was told that the position he held called for a college-educated engineer, but he could sit on the help desk or haul the equipment around. He chose to retire since he had the money to do so, but it was a cruel blow to him. Due to some learning disabilities – his father considered him to be stupid, which I’ve had enough conversations with him to know how false that was – higher education out his reach.
In my grandsons’ day, it’s been all “college, college, college,” but many of their contemporaries are living on ramen noodles and finding that the jobs aren’t there.
That’s decline and fall in a nutshell.
@JMG (#471):
Of course you may — always!
Luhrmann is an inveterate boundary-pusher, and has been from day one of her academic career. What other American anthropologist would go on to seriously study, without any condescension at all, various small Christian congregations in the US that receive messages directly from (their) God? It’s a credit to her university, Stanford, that they recognized the exceptional excellence of her anthropological work in general, and of the theory she has been carefully developing to account for such experiences.
I found money once, back in the 1990s, to invite her to come to my university to give a public talk on the study of magic and its contemporary users in the West. My wife and I had a long comfortable dinner with her afterwards, so I can even claim to have some sense of her as a person. She struck me as a very decent and thoughtful human being.
@Scotlyn (#474):
Yes, indeed, cohorts of male elders also play a significant role in the process. But men bond together in different, and “leaner,” less personally intimate, ways than women do — or so it seems to me. They pass on different skill-sets to the rising generation than women do, of course; but the differences between cohorts of male and of female elders seem (to me, of course) to go far deeper than that. This is why I think that, of the two, cohorts of female elders are somewhat more necessary.
Apparently the Chinese elites have their own bubbles that they are inflating:
https://nitter.net/JucheAffirmer/status/2074821608166789465
https://nitter.net/JucheAffirmer/status/2074886756113986033
So seems like that anybody hoping that the economies of the West collapsing will end bubble inflation once and for all are probably going to be very disappointed. We’re probably going to have to wait until the end of Faustian civilization and Faustian influence around the world, and at this point this includes China overthrowing its own Faustian pseudomorphosis. Cause otherwise the same stuff that’s been happening here in the west will also end up happening in China and other parts of East Asia and Southeast Asia.
@ Robert Mathiesen # 468 & # 467
Thank you for introducing me to Dr. Luhrmann. I think I will enjoy reading her work.
@ JMG # 471
I have noticed that disenchantment depends on how much people rely on an understanding of cause-effect relationships to deal with their environment versus how much they rely on empathy. This has to do with the complexity of ontological models discovered by them. Catabolic collapse, on the other hand, depends on the ratio of utility to maintainability of capital infrastructure.
While both of these occur towards the peak of a civilisation, their apparent co-occurrence is the result of a common cause – the time spent by the culture slow building its ontology and its infrastructure – and one is not the direct cause of the other. The Late Bronze Age offers an example where disenchantment was followed very quickly by collapse, leading Jayenes to conclude a direct causal link. But Rome lasted a couple of centuries between the Satyricon and the fall of Western Rome, and Eastern Rome experienced a return to enchantment and also avoided total catabolic collapse for over a millennium.
Being from Britain, a country which has not experienced any per capita economic growth in real terms since 2007, and arguably has had a reduction in its vague but real quality of life, it isnt easy to dismiss the claim that peak (conventional) oil has had a strong negative impact.
At least we have the canal network. One of my infrastructual/ecological interests (the best type of infrastructure — one that enhances the countryside it passes through in a positive sum interaction with the rest of nature, if done right). I wonder if it will be possible to persuade a British government to build the Grand Contour Canal? If not primarily for freight, then at least for water; the South East is very parched, and the existing canal network is already being used to move water. Would be a lot more effective of course if dredged to its design depths, which would also make freight more viable and reduce energy consumption of boats,
>[JMG]: Paradoctor, not if you factor in the full manufacturing (including sourcing raw materials), maintenance, and disposal costs. If solar + batteries were cheaper than coal, then solar + batteries would produce a share of global primary energy comparable to coal, instead of being a niche market.
This strikes me as flawed reasoning. There exists a concept of infrastructural momentum or sunk costs, or technological lock-in, which prevents a region or country from instantaneously switching to a superior way of doing things without any delay . Solar only recently became the cheapest source of energy (including coal and oil), and it takes time to replace one type of infrastructure with another. In fact, I am surprised that you are still touting these same talking points from years or even decades ago, considering how rapidly the deployment of solar energy has increased in the intervening years and how much the costs have declined since then. I do understand that monetary cost is an imperfect way of understanding the true cost of something, but when the cost of a product falls by 100x or even 1000x over a period of decades it is safe to say that a fundamental change has occurred. Last year, solar generation increased worldwide at roughly a rate of 600TwH/year, and if you conservatively assume these panels have a 30 year lifespan, this would amount to 18PwH of total solar installation over the life cycle of the panels. Now, global energy use is about 200PwH, but since half of fossil fuel consumption is lost as waste heat, only about 100PwH of electrical energy would be needed to fully replace this total energy consumption. The rate of solar deployment has increased by more than a factor of 100 in the past 20 years. If (when) it increases by another factor of 5 or so, which at current rates would only happen a few years from now, it will be on a trajectory to completely displace all fossil fuel usage within the following 30 years.
I’m assuming you’re still using the EROI figures from the Hall and Prieto book from a decade ago? The methodology in that book always struck me as flawed and it is clear that solar deployment did not plateau in Spain, Italy and Greece in the way that they predicted. I am sceptical of the notion that we have a way to accurately measure something like “whole-system EROI” for a single product at all, but one indicator that something is worth the investment is that it is being deployed at an exponential rate in multiple countries (not just a few countries that are subsidizing the technology but nearly every country on Earth these days, even very poor ones which cannot afford to easily subsidize new techs), and that the long-term cost of the tech is cheaper than its competitors, both of which have been true for solar energy for multiple years now. Does this mean society will not decline in the coming decades? No, it doesn’t necessarily mean this at all, but if it does decline it will not be for a lack of energy and I believe it is time that you update your model of what is going on in light of these recent developments.
According to the research of Charles Hall, the EROI of PV panels are 1:3 and onshore wind is 1:15 to 1:20 including manufacturing, maintainence, and decomissioning over their life cycles. Certainly, it is highly doubtful that we can run a version of present day society on these machines, and they depend on fossil fuels to create, install, and maintain, but it is not a bad use of some of our remaining fossil fuels as the energy that is allocated to them actually increases 1:3 and 1:15-20 by harnessing the power of nature . The can extend an after party to the fossil fuel age.